Why don't you find a camping spot with a good 3G or 4G singal and use a solar power solution. You can tether your phone by enabling the hotspost feature. You can also charge your devices or even run off AC by picking up a solar panel kit. For a few hundred dollars at Harbor Freight, you can by a two panel solar kit with inverter and a compatible 12V battery to store it. If you plan on hiking in, you can also get a small portable charging system with USB which you can use to charge your phone and a small Windows tablet, which you can make as useful as a laptop with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
I've read and been told several times to avoid extended warranties and insurance, but I personally have found that they generally pay for themselves on big-ticket items like laptops and smart phones. For those that are accident prone or unlucky with electronics, like me, they are a lifesaver.
I replace my laptop every 2-3 years. Parts start to fail after about 1.5 years, but base warranties expire after one year. Purchasing the extended warranty allows me to budget my laptop purchases more carefully and save up for less frequent laptop purchases that are an improvement over my previous laptop, rather than paying to replace my current laptop more frequently. The same goes with cell phone insurance. I carry it around with me everywhere I go and sometimes s**t happens.
Extended warranties and accident insurance are two insurance products where the companies don't have the luxury of evaluating the risk of individual policies, but instead issue everybody the same price at point of sale. The prices are set in such a way that most people are basically overpaying by enough not only to make the company a healthy profit but also to offset costs incurred by people like myself.
Don't mean to point out the obvious, but TFA states that Obama's now the defendant, not Bush, because Obama's now the president. Requesting a stay only means that he's buying some time. I'd do the same if I found myself in a new job being sued for what my predecessor did.
On the other hand, he can disagree with spying on US citizens but still support immunity for the telecoms. A private company (or individual) should not be punished for cooperating with the government when the government was doing something illegal. Sure, its a Nuremberg defense, but the difference here is that we're talking about a legally ambiguous request, not a heinous immoral act like genocide or DRM.
This has nothing to do with the environment. It is simply a greenwashed incentive for boosting the ailing auto industry. Not that there's anything wrong with that given our economic woes, but it's kinda dishonest. Not only does the production of a new car produce more pollution (as another commenter pointed out), but many older cars are still fuel efficient, especially small ones that are well maintained, while new cars other than hybrids are no more fuel efficient than they were a decade ago. My aging stick-shifting Saturn, for example, still gets around 40 mpg on the highway even though it is now 11 years old.
If they were really interested in environmental issues, they would instead propose an investment public transportation and give those who scrap their cars free train/bus passes.
In most cities public transport is a joke. There's limited or no rail service and a network of depressing buses. Would I scrap my carbon belcher for a few years of free rides on an expanded and convenient public transit system? Maybe. But is this the point of this bill? Probably not.
Could somebody please explain this to me in terms an idiot (read: humanities major) like me could understand. This looks potentially interesting, if only my brain were big enough to understand it!
If I understand things correctly, the author of TFA is the creator of bingo-card making software for teachers to use in classroom activities. The shareware version is restricted to only create 15 cards, on the assumption that this will not be enough cards for every student, so the teacher (who also assumes that the teacher will probably use this for one lesson and then never again), wants to charge the teacher (who has over 15 students, so obviously not a teacher in a private or well-funduded suburban school) 25 USD just to teach a single lesson, or rather a single activity. Teachers don't exactly have expense accounts, and don't get paid well-enough to be expected to pay out of pocket (although they usually do anyway). As a teacher myself, I have often found myself stumbling upon such software (for learning games, quiz creation, etc), but since I spend enough already on my classroom (and my school only reimburses 50 USD per yaer) I have usually just uninstall it when I realize that it is crippled and now restrict my search to Sourceforge (and what's bundled with Edubuntu). That being said, the vast majority of such tools are not FOSS and only run on the Windows platform. They are crippled shareware apps that ususally cost about 25 USD, and are often poorly written since they are designed for one-off use. Perhaps a better solution might be for more open-source educational projects (which there are, but not nearly as many as by commercial vendors), but teachers are a time-poor lot who don't usually have time for such endeavors.
I flew back from Europe on August 10/11 (Athens to NYC via Prague), and I had to check my laptop bag, since we were only allowed our wallet, passport, and boarding pass with us on the plane. I arrived at my departure airport blissfully unaware of the situation and carrying my iBook stuffed into a flimzy laptop bag (no safer-than-the-plane's-black-box Halliburton case). Even so, the machine survived the trip as checked baggage without any damage.
Damage, however, was not the biggest worry for me -- it was loss and theft. As anyone who as ever travelled and changed planes knows, bags get lost all the time and valuables get stolen (which is why most people put them into their carry-ons). I had my ipod, digital camera, and computer in one case, which the airport agent kindly wrapped in security tape before checking. All the same, the bag broadcast the fact that it contained a computer, and baggage handlers don't get paid enough to be honest. When I got to New York (JFK), it was the only bag that did not make it through, although it was not stolen. (Perhaps, with a case as expensive as the one in TFA, perhaps it may have been stolen, since it absolutely screms "Here be valuables!"
Fortunately for me, it turned out that the bag was stopped and searched, so it did not make it onto the plane. The airline found it and got it back to me within days, but judging from the massive line of angry people at the desk -- and the fact that many of them left the desk even angrier -- I think I was one of the lucky ones.
That may be part of the reason that the rules were relaxed to allow laptops, since forcing people to check their laptops exposes the airlines to alot of expensive liablity for things that passengers would normally take responsibility for in their carry-ons.
I think you are being excessively paranoid about identity theft via stolen bank statements, stolen mail, etc. And, should this happen, this type of outright theft is very obvious and is thus the easiest to resolve. However, most identity theft happens when somebody who already knows you (ie, family, close friends) uses the information that they already have about you to open accounts in your name. This is the kind you should really watch out for, both because it is so common and since it is nearly impossible to clear up.
Thank you for pointing out TOR. I was not aware of this project, but it looks very interesting, and I think I'll try setting up a server, since I have a ton of bandwidth that goes to waste on my cable modem (no home phone line, so it's the only way to read slashdot...)
While I don't have the time or energy to be a very active file-sharer, I used to be and have found that it has greatly expanded my horizons in terms of foreign / independent music and film. So, I am a firm believer in this free exchange and am always looking for better ways to facilitate this. I tried Freenet (and have a node running 24/7) but I have been consistently disappointed both by the ineffeciency of the technology and the low quality of the content, which is apparently posted only by crazy people, whose free speech I'm not to sure I want to expend effort to keep free. Instead, I'm mostly concerned about the free exchange of cultural materials, which generally occurs over the internet at large and which is now in danger from commercial interests. From what I can tell, TOR appears to address that danger.
I personally suspect that one of the major frustrations that the content industry has with freely downloadable content is not that people are not paying for it, but that it weakens their position as cultural gatekeepers, a position which has in the past enabled them to control the tastes, and thus the dollars, of their respective markets. Chances are that since it costs much less to download something than it does to buy it, people who download generally consume more media than they would otherwise. On the surface, this can only be a good thing for a music industry that has, thanks to the emergence of other technologies like games, gadgets, etc, recently become one of several competitors for the attention and spare dollars of the young people What really bugs them is that downloadable content challenges the idea that cultural content is a commodity that can be controlled by their industry. On the p2p networks, one can find, in addition to the legion of eminem and bootlegged copies of blockbusters, a large availability of nonstandard and obscure content (cf. what is listed on torrentspy) that can be freely sampled and compared with what is commerically available. Unfortunately for the gatekeepers, commercial content comes out looking the worse for it. As a result, many consumers become more savvy and, when they spend their money on CDs, DVDs, and other media, they spend more of it on independent or foreign releases, which can not be easily controlled by the industries. When DVDs first came out, this is why they pressured the hardware makers to install region control (and later tried to prosecute the inventor of deCSS), and why bypassing region control has become a DIY staple of every film-geek, myself included. Before that, there was NTSC vs. PAL on VCRs, which still persists. For the music industry, there are radio station 'indies' (legal payola vie middle-men) and music videos, both of which, because they cost large chunks of money, effectively limit the marketability of music to only the most well-heeled labels and distributors.
P2P and other net technologies endanger this business model not because they allow people to enjoy free content, but because the absence of real barriers to entry (apart from a fast connection) allows anybody to distribute content, effectively stripping the entertainment industry of the ability to regulate the tastes of their market.
As your specific example of 'if (!ptr)' vs'if (ptr==NULL)', regardless of whether or not one is more optimized than the other, there is really is little difference between the two in terms of readability, since everybody who would need to read the code would understand that. But !ptr may be a better choice for another reason: typos. A coder would be muchs less likely to mistype !ptr than he (my apologies for that last pronoun to the female Slashdot readers out there, all three of them. But I digress) than he would ptr==NULL, since more keystrokes = more opportunities to make little mistakes. As proof of that, I recently had to type in a missing NULL into the code of Nautilus' print manager because it wouldn't compile without it.
As much as I hate to say it, if you want to play games that are designed for Windows, the best thing to do is boot into Windows. No matter how good Cedega gets, it will still be an attempt to imitate the environment that the game was designed for, and will always have some performane lag. Not only that, but if it is a graphically intensive video game, as most are, you will want the best possible video drivers for direct rendering and such, and in that respect, Linux is nowhere nere as adept as Windows yet. But, on the bright side, since the game is full screen, you won't have any of the annoying widgets like the 'start' menu around to remind you what OS you're in.
If, however, you still want to play your game on Linux, I don't think that the distribution really matters. What does matter is that you are using the vendor supplied proprietary driver, either from nVidia or from ATI, rather than the open source equivalent, which is not nearly as good at demanding rendering tasks. Most distributions, including Fedora and Redhat, only include the open source version, so be sure to go to your video card maker's website and download their linux drivers.
This makes Helix player "the best choice" by default since no open source alternative can legally exist. (thanks to patents and what not)
Pardon?!! Helix player IS open source, plain and simple. It's got CVS access, bugzilla, and even the words 'community' and '.org' in their web address (https://player.helixcommunity.org/) The only difference between Helix Player and the RealPlayer10 linux client is that RealPlayer comes with proprietary codecs (thanks to Real's pocketbook, legal too!) and Helix doesn't (just open source ones like ogg). This is no different thhat Sun bundling StarOffice with proprietary fonts and clipart, while the OpenOffice.org suite is still freely redistributable under the GPL.
(uh oh, here comes the troll...) Maybe Real should take a cue from Sun and put '.org' into the name of the app to clue some of the denser Slashdotters in. Jeeze, first they make a commercial quality open source linux player,then they go out and buy legitimate codecs for it, and everybody still badmouths them. Come on people: the linux client contains none of the built in ads or tracking tools of the Windows that is Real's primary revenue stream. Instead, they milk that out of the Windows clients (and the sheep who use them) and try to get a little of their dignity and credibility back by giving the Linux community a great and open source app (which doesn't make Real any money: no tracking, software registration, or ads, or even RealGuide). Any more generous than that they'd get rug burns. Whether we like their software or not, the least we could do is say 'thank you'.
For one thing, MUI. It provides the user a very powerful way of customizing his or her own desktop environment to a rediculous degree. In other words, point and click theme creation and editing. It is to Ambient what the Gimp is to images. As far as I know, there isn't much that one can do to design a custom theme in either Gnome or KDE without editing text files by hand. The most either of the two of them will let you do is specify a premade theme for individual parts of the desktop (background, window manager, gui toolkit, etc.). I use Gnome, and there are so many GTK and Metacity themes that I really like except for one or two little things that bug me, but that I'm to lazy to edit the files directly (not to mention that I'm certainly too lazy to figure out how). Something like MUI would be great to have around for fixing the odd ugly scrollbar or widget. But that's just my opinion.
Wow, from the screenshots, Ambient looks beautiful. I, for one, am elated that it's now open source. Although I don't think that it will catch on as a mainstream desktop as a real alternative to Gnome or KDE, developers in either camp (or maybe even MorphOS developers) would be wise to take a good look and incorporate some of this into their own work. Alternately, if this could be ported or made compatible with Gtk or Qt,it could be integrated into an already functional desktop environment. It's bitmapped and creative eye candy like this (see the screenshots section for many interesting examples) that has the potential to entice more casual computer users to explore alternative OSes, whose dominant desktop environments, for the most part, only try to emulate, rather than compete with or improve opon, the standard Windows featureset (like the silly 'start' button) that people are used to.
Let's not forget Shareaza (www.shareaza.com). It's by far the best P2P software out there (partial downloads, connects to ED2k, Gnutella 1 and 2, and bittorrent), and, unlike Kazaa, comes with no spyware. And, drumroll pleasse, not only is it free as in beer, but it's also free as in speech (GPL'd open source). Unfortunately, it's only available on Windows.
This may be ironic (or just bad coincidence). Immediately after finishing the above post, I find 5 moderator points in my account (an xmas present from Slashdot?). Only now I can't use 'em...
I don't have any moderator points left, but if I did, I would use all of them to mod you down, just for making a 2010 reference. C'mon, please, do not dignify that movie by referencing again. Or else the Ghost of Kubrick past will visit you.
Not necessarily. The great thing about Portage is the ability to interactively update config. files using the utility 'etc-update'. This tool will list all updated config. files, automatically merge inconsequential changes like whitespace, allow the useer to compare the differences side by side, pick one version over the other, manually edit the final result, and, most importantly, undo the changes when things go horribly wrong (provided you don't delete the temporary files).
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't you find a camping spot with a good 3G or 4G singal and use a solar power solution. You can tether your phone by enabling the hotspost feature. You can also charge your devices or even run off AC by picking up a solar panel kit. For a few hundred dollars at Harbor Freight, you can by a two panel solar kit with inverter and a compatible 12V battery to store it. If you plan on hiking in, you can also get a small portable charging system with USB which you can use to charge your phone and a small Windows tablet, which you can make as useful as a laptop with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
I've read and been told several times to avoid extended warranties and insurance, but I personally have found that they generally pay for themselves on big-ticket items like laptops and smart phones. For those that are accident prone or unlucky with electronics, like me, they are a lifesaver. I replace my laptop every 2-3 years. Parts start to fail after about 1.5 years, but base warranties expire after one year. Purchasing the extended warranty allows me to budget my laptop purchases more carefully and save up for less frequent laptop purchases that are an improvement over my previous laptop, rather than paying to replace my current laptop more frequently. The same goes with cell phone insurance. I carry it around with me everywhere I go and sometimes s**t happens. Extended warranties and accident insurance are two insurance products where the companies don't have the luxury of evaluating the risk of individual policies, but instead issue everybody the same price at point of sale. The prices are set in such a way that most people are basically overpaying by enough not only to make the company a healthy profit but also to offset costs incurred by people like myself.
Don't mean to point out the obvious, but TFA states that Obama's now the defendant, not Bush, because Obama's now the president. Requesting a stay only means that he's buying some time. I'd do the same if I found myself in a new job being sued for what my predecessor did.
On the other hand, he can disagree with spying on US citizens but still support immunity for the telecoms. A private company (or individual) should not be punished for cooperating with the government when the government was doing something illegal. Sure, its a Nuremberg defense, but the difference here is that we're talking about a legally ambiguous request, not a heinous immoral act like genocide or DRM.
This has nothing to do with the environment. It is simply a greenwashed incentive for boosting the ailing auto industry. Not that there's anything wrong with that given our economic woes, but it's kinda dishonest. Not only does the production of a new car produce more pollution (as another commenter pointed out), but many older cars are still fuel efficient, especially small ones that are well maintained, while new cars other than hybrids are no more fuel efficient than they were a decade ago. My aging stick-shifting Saturn, for example, still gets around 40 mpg on the highway even though it is now 11 years old. If they were really interested in environmental issues, they would instead propose an investment public transportation and give those who scrap their cars free train/bus passes. In most cities public transport is a joke. There's limited or no rail service and a network of depressing buses. Would I scrap my carbon belcher for a few years of free rides on an expanded and convenient public transit system? Maybe. But is this the point of this bill? Probably not.
Biochemistry?
Elbot: How did you find out about me? Me: Slashdot. Elbot: That explains all the geeks around here lately. I did not make that up.
I saw that James Bond film too, where the bomb detonator in the pipeline was a PDA running WindowsCE. I guess paid product placement backfired, huh.
Could somebody please explain this to me in terms an idiot (read: humanities major) like me could understand. This looks potentially interesting, if only my brain were big enough to understand it!
If I understand things correctly, the author of TFA is the creator of bingo-card making software for teachers to use in classroom activities. The shareware version is restricted to only create 15 cards, on the assumption that this will not be enough cards for every student, so the teacher (who also assumes that the teacher will probably use this for one lesson and then never again), wants to charge the teacher (who has over 15 students, so obviously not a teacher in a private or well-funduded suburban school) 25 USD just to teach a single lesson, or rather a single activity. Teachers don't exactly have expense accounts, and don't get paid well-enough to be expected to pay out of pocket (although they usually do anyway). As a teacher myself, I have often found myself stumbling upon such software (for learning games, quiz creation, etc), but since I spend enough already on my classroom (and my school only reimburses 50 USD per yaer) I have usually just uninstall it when I realize that it is crippled and now restrict my search to Sourceforge (and what's bundled with Edubuntu). That being said, the vast majority of such tools are not FOSS and only run on the Windows platform. They are crippled shareware apps that ususally cost about 25 USD, and are often poorly written since they are designed for one-off use. Perhaps a better solution might be for more open-source educational projects (which there are, but not nearly as many as by commercial vendors), but teachers are a time-poor lot who don't usually have time for such endeavors.
I flew back from Europe on August 10/11 (Athens to NYC via Prague), and I had to check my laptop bag, since we were only allowed our wallet, passport, and boarding pass with us on the plane. I arrived at my departure airport blissfully unaware of the situation and carrying my iBook stuffed into a flimzy laptop bag (no safer-than-the-plane's-black-box Halliburton case). Even so, the machine survived the trip as checked baggage without any damage. Damage, however, was not the biggest worry for me -- it was loss and theft. As anyone who as ever travelled and changed planes knows, bags get lost all the time and valuables get stolen (which is why most people put them into their carry-ons). I had my ipod, digital camera, and computer in one case, which the airport agent kindly wrapped in security tape before checking. All the same, the bag broadcast the fact that it contained a computer, and baggage handlers don't get paid enough to be honest. When I got to New York (JFK), it was the only bag that did not make it through, although it was not stolen. (Perhaps, with a case as expensive as the one in TFA, perhaps it may have been stolen, since it absolutely screms "Here be valuables!" Fortunately for me, it turned out that the bag was stopped and searched, so it did not make it onto the plane. The airline found it and got it back to me within days, but judging from the massive line of angry people at the desk -- and the fact that many of them left the desk even angrier -- I think I was one of the lucky ones. That may be part of the reason that the rules were relaxed to allow laptops, since forcing people to check their laptops exposes the airlines to alot of expensive liablity for things that passengers would normally take responsibility for in their carry-ons.
I think you are being excessively paranoid about identity theft via stolen bank statements, stolen mail, etc. And, should this happen, this type of outright theft is very obvious and is thus the easiest to resolve. However, most identity theft happens when somebody who already knows you (ie, family, close friends) uses the information that they already have about you to open accounts in your name. This is the kind you should really watch out for, both because it is so common and since it is nearly impossible to clear up.
Thank you for pointing out TOR. I was not aware of this project, but it looks very interesting, and I think I'll try setting up a server, since I have a ton of bandwidth that goes to waste on my cable modem (no home phone line, so it's the only way to read slashdot...) While I don't have the time or energy to be a very active file-sharer, I used to be and have found that it has greatly expanded my horizons in terms of foreign / independent music and film. So, I am a firm believer in this free exchange and am always looking for better ways to facilitate this. I tried Freenet (and have a node running 24/7) but I have been consistently disappointed both by the ineffeciency of the technology and the low quality of the content, which is apparently posted only by crazy people, whose free speech I'm not to sure I want to expend effort to keep free. Instead, I'm mostly concerned about the free exchange of cultural materials, which generally occurs over the internet at large and which is now in danger from commercial interests. From what I can tell, TOR appears to address that danger. I personally suspect that one of the major frustrations that the content industry has with freely downloadable content is not that people are not paying for it, but that it weakens their position as cultural gatekeepers, a position which has in the past enabled them to control the tastes, and thus the dollars, of their respective markets. Chances are that since it costs much less to download something than it does to buy it, people who download generally consume more media than they would otherwise. On the surface, this can only be a good thing for a music industry that has, thanks to the emergence of other technologies like games, gadgets, etc, recently become one of several competitors for the attention and spare dollars of the young people What really bugs them is that downloadable content challenges the idea that cultural content is a commodity that can be controlled by their industry. On the p2p networks, one can find, in addition to the legion of eminem and bootlegged copies of blockbusters, a large availability of nonstandard and obscure content (cf. what is listed on torrentspy) that can be freely sampled and compared with what is commerically available. Unfortunately for the gatekeepers, commercial content comes out looking the worse for it. As a result, many consumers become more savvy and, when they spend their money on CDs, DVDs, and other media, they spend more of it on independent or foreign releases, which can not be easily controlled by the industries. When DVDs first came out, this is why they pressured the hardware makers to install region control (and later tried to prosecute the inventor of deCSS), and why bypassing region control has become a DIY staple of every film-geek, myself included. Before that, there was NTSC vs. PAL on VCRs, which still persists. For the music industry, there are radio station 'indies' (legal payola vie middle-men) and music videos, both of which, because they cost large chunks of money, effectively limit the marketability of music to only the most well-heeled labels and distributors. P2P and other net technologies endanger this business model not because they allow people to enjoy free content, but because the absence of real barriers to entry (apart from a fast connection) allows anybody to distribute content, effectively stripping the entertainment industry of the ability to regulate the tastes of their market.
You scared me for a second. At first, it looked like it said 'fair and balanced'.
Amen!
As your specific example of 'if (!ptr)' vs'if (ptr==NULL)', regardless of whether or not one is more optimized than the other, there is really is little difference between the two in terms of readability, since everybody who would need to read the code would understand that. But !ptr may be a better choice for another reason: typos. A coder would be muchs less likely to mistype !ptr than he (my apologies for that last pronoun to the female Slashdot readers out there, all three of them. But I digress) than he would ptr==NULL, since more keystrokes = more opportunities to make little mistakes. As proof of that, I recently had to type in a missing NULL into the code of Nautilus' print manager because it wouldn't compile without it.
As much as I hate to say it, if you want to play games that are designed for Windows, the best thing to do is boot into Windows. No matter how good Cedega gets, it will still be an attempt to imitate the environment that the game was designed for, and will always have some performane lag. Not only that, but if it is a graphically intensive video game, as most are, you will want the best possible video drivers for direct rendering and such, and in that respect, Linux is nowhere nere as adept as Windows yet. But, on the bright side, since the game is full screen, you won't have any of the annoying widgets like the 'start' menu around to remind you what OS you're in. If, however, you still want to play your game on Linux, I don't think that the distribution really matters. What does matter is that you are using the vendor supplied proprietary driver, either from nVidia or from ATI, rather than the open source equivalent, which is not nearly as good at demanding rendering tasks. Most distributions, including Fedora and Redhat, only include the open source version, so be sure to go to your video card maker's website and download their linux drivers.
For one thing, MUI. It provides the user a very powerful way of customizing his or her own desktop environment to a rediculous degree. In other words, point and click theme creation and editing. It is to Ambient what the Gimp is to images. As far as I know, there isn't much that one can do to design a custom theme in either Gnome or KDE without editing text files by hand. The most either of the two of them will let you do is specify a premade theme for individual parts of the desktop (background, window manager, gui toolkit, etc.). I use Gnome, and there are so many GTK and Metacity themes that I really like except for one or two little things that bug me, but that I'm to lazy to edit the files directly (not to mention that I'm certainly too lazy to figure out how). Something like MUI would be great to have around for fixing the odd ugly scrollbar or widget. But that's just my opinion.
Wow, from the screenshots, Ambient looks beautiful. I, for one, am elated that it's now open source. Although I don't think that it will catch on as a mainstream desktop as a real alternative to Gnome or KDE, developers in either camp (or maybe even MorphOS developers) would be wise to take a good look and incorporate some of this into their own work. Alternately, if this could be ported or made compatible with Gtk or Qt,it could be integrated into an already functional desktop environment. It's bitmapped and creative eye candy like this (see the screenshots section for many interesting examples) that has the potential to entice more casual computer users to explore alternative OSes, whose dominant desktop environments, for the most part, only try to emulate, rather than compete with or improve opon, the standard Windows featureset (like the silly 'start' button) that people are used to.
Let's not forget Shareaza (www.shareaza.com). It's by far the best P2P software out there (partial downloads, connects to ED2k, Gnutella 1 and 2, and bittorrent), and, unlike Kazaa, comes with no spyware. And, drumroll pleasse, not only is it free as in beer, but it's also free as in speech (GPL'd open source). Unfortunately, it's only available on Windows.
This may be ironic (or just bad coincidence). Immediately after finishing the above post, I find 5 moderator points in my account (an xmas present from Slashdot?). Only now I can't use 'em...
I don't have any moderator points left, but if I did, I would use all of them to mod you down, just for making a 2010 reference. C'mon, please, do not dignify that movie by referencing again. Or else the Ghost of Kubrick past will visit you.
Not necessarily. The great thing about Portage is the ability to interactively update config. files using the utility 'etc-update'. This tool will list all updated config. files, automatically merge inconsequential changes like whitespace, allow the useer to compare the differences side by side, pick one version over the other, manually edit the final result, and, most importantly, undo the changes when things go horribly wrong (provided you don't delete the temporary files).