Sorry, gotta contradict you on that. Roundabouts scale better with more traffic, not worse. Seen it in action many times. And if you think roundabouts have to be single-lane, think again. I've seen them 5, 6 lanes across, with traffic lights. They are confusing at first if you are not used to them, but they actually work noticeably more smoothly once you become accustomed.
"THe banking industry is probably wanting a step up in security, while the NSA under Alexander had horrible internal security. Alexander's forte seems to be using brute force to break the security of others, not actually keeping an organization secure."
Perhaps that's his pitch?
The best defense is a good offense. Instead of fixing your security flaws, just make sure that getting to important systems will take some time, and be detected. Then wait for attacks to start, counterattack, and wipe out the attackers before they can get to the goodies.
Unfortunately while that sounds like a great movie plot it sounds like a really bad way to try and secure billions of dollars.
I dont know where you got that but I have studied human evolution a bit and dont recall ever seeing such an assertion. Humans are adaptable and certain groups are very good fishermen, but there is no evidence I am aware of that fishing was ever more than a minority lifeway, or a supplemental skill. There was a time when significant human expansions occurred through a 'beach-comber' style of gathering, but that was MUCH too recent to have had anything to do with the evolution of the brain, which was already done long before.
And the other apes HAVE evolved brains very much like ours, btw. Far more like ours than like anything else.
"If it had been the exact same situation, just a combination lock on on physical file cabinet in his office, once a proper court subpena was issued Law Enforcement might have asked for the combination as a courtesy but would have been perfectly within their rights to simply cut the thing open."
The only difference appears to be that the LE agency involved purports to be incapable of 'cutting the lock.'
Well that and the unwise statements made to police by the defendant voluntarily. It would be interesting if a similar case could be constructed with an un-cuttable physical lock, but of course such things do not exist...
The ruling appears flawed, I sympathize with the dissent, but yeah. This guy screwed himself, in typical lawyer fashion, with excess arrogance.
He did not have to tell the police anything here, he has probably lectured his clients many times on exactly why they should never talk to the police, does not matter if you have nothing to hide, does not matter if you think you have done nothing wrong, and if you have done something but think you can talk your way out of it you are a fool. Ask for your lawyer then shut your mouth, and do not answer any questions, I dont care if they ask you about the weather, the reply is 'ask my lawyer.'
From the language used in the opinion, if he had simply shut his mouth and not started bragging/volunteering information, he would be in a very different situation today.
It does require some protein but that does not require exclusive or even preferential meat eating. Apes typically supplement a primarily fruit and veggie diet with various types of easy to acquire "meat" - insects of various types, termites in particular, are commonly consumed for supplemental protein. Larger animals are killed by Apes very rarely, and consumption of the corpses is even rarer, not entirely unheard of but certainly not part of the normal diet.
I didnt see the movie the other poster mentioned, but I know the Hmong nonetheless. If you are older you might remember them as the 'Montagnards' or mountain men who allied with the US in Vietnam. Quite a few made it out and settled in the US at the end.
"It's not just that they ate veggies, they cooked them. Was there any other animal which we know that cooked its own food besides us?"
If you expand 'cooked' to the more generic 'prepared' then plenty of animals would qualify. In fact if you consider things like pickled herring and kimchee 'cooked' then we could probably argue that many animals do cook their food - crocodiles, for instance, are known to stash their kills in underwater caches for long periods before eating which 'cooks' the flesh using the chemical processes of decomposition, the resulting meal is roughly as 'cooked' as lutfisk or surströmming.
But no, I cannot think of any animals outside of hominids that have learned to start and control fires, which is a prerequisite for 'cooking' in most senses.
"Yes, but you can't build the wall just to survive prevailing winds, what happens if it *does* get hit by a tornado?"
Presumably one section of the wall would be badly damaged. It would still be a relatively small section, and I would guess the wall would probably continue to function effectively even with several small sections taken out of it.
I'm not saying the idea isnt ridiculous and impractical - just that it isnt ridiculous and impractical for the reasons the guy I was replying to gave.
Except as you said the hoover dam is far from uniform, it varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and the walls themselves are only part of it - a large part of that cost has to do with the turbines and generators and associated machinery, not just the walls. Plus you have that whole deal about diverting a major river during construction, and of course the whole "we are turning the river back afterwards and making a lake" thing adds requirements and expenses as well.
That's pretty clearly not comparable to something very uniform that only needs to stand on dry land and obstruct some wind.
It's not just the Supremes, all courts were originally supposed to take such a broad view, and sometimes do. But more typically, they will make what they see as a legally conservative ruling even when they can clearly see it is wrong, and rationalize that it is the higher courts job to reverse them.
" Finally, I'd also like to point out that while the US abides by the Geneva convention and other treaties and accords, it is not a signatory of the same, so while the Geneva convention sets good rules, the US is only bound to them as long as they voluntarily comply."
This is absolutely incorrect.
The US is a party to all 4 Geneva conventions, and one additional protocol (protocol 3.) These have been ratified by the Senate and are law of the land.
The benefit is only asymmetric if you (as Comcast appears to do) define 'fulfilling our contractual obligations to our customers' as a non-benefit.
Comcast sees more benefit in refusing to provide the service they are being paid for than in living up to their obligations, and that's the big problem here. The fact that they have no effective competition for most of their customers is a big part of why. The fact that they provide their own services at higher margins that compete with third party services accessible on the internet is the other big piece of it.
Both problems could be solved at once by simply making it law that ISPs have to be ISPs, and cannot be part of a larger business. Existing conglomerates like Comcast would have a period of time to spin off the ISP service which would from that point forward be ONLY an ISP and statutorily disallowed from acquiring or being acquired by other sorts of businesses.
And yes, I am a free market 'fanatic' so to some this will be a shocking view from me, but 1. the existing market is far from free and 2. a simple statutory restriction is a lot better than giving more regulatory power to the bureaucrats which will only be captured.
IMOP the two subjects that are critical here and get neglected are logic and number theory. Logic typically gets covered as a first or second year course in college - after many years of courses that depend on it. Teaching it much earlier would make more sense and result in better comprehension of other subjects.
Number theory is, in my experience, the branch of mathematics most relevant to programming. Far more relevant than either calculus or statistics, and (for me at least) much easier as well. Like logic it's really foundational for a lot of other stuff. Yet it's essentially unheard of. No?
"So, again, where is anyone but you claiming things don't compile?"
It's not something you can contest, it's known and obvious. You cant compile it because you do not get the source.
The source for a shim whose only purpose is to load a binary into the kernel where a driver should have gone instead is certainly not a substitute, let alone a good substitute.
"And to be frank, I care a LOT more about things working, than being able to examine 100% of the source code."
It's a false dichotomy you (and many others) setup here, trying to claim pragmatism. It's not pragmatism though, it's simply short-sightedness combined with laziness.
"X works well enough for me, with my stuff, right now, today." There's your 'pragmatic' justification for being lazy. A real pragmatist would be concerned about how it would work with the next stuff he gets, and the stuff after that, and someone who is not intellectually lazy would certainly have some serious concerns about corrupting an otherwise Free system by integrating a black-box binary directly to the kernel, to say the least.
Frankly this is the sort of thing that should cause alarm bells to go off inside your head so hard you fall to the ground clutching your bleeding ears - solely as a pragmatist. If you had any intellectual commitment to Free Software that might intensify it even further, but it's certainly not needed.
Oh bullsquat. A PC is a Personal Computer. I am in my fourth decade of using PCs, and I have used PCs with many diverse architectures, build around chips ranging from the Z80 and x86 to Motorola 68k, MIPS, Alpha, etc. Hardware changes almost as often as skirt lengths, and often for similar reasons. A system that will work in that environment MUST include real, human-readable code, not a brittle binary written for a single monad out of the entire universe of hardware and software combinations.
What you were trying to say is 'unless you are using something other than the currently popular x86 compatible intel/amd hardware' which leaves a LOT more room outside it, but even that is not actually accurate - even if you are using exactly that it STILL wont work properly. You can claim otherwise all you want, but you admitted it does not compile so you are only contradicting yourself at this point.
That's a show stopper bug right there, absolutely unacceptable. "Works as long as you do not use the system" does not describe something that truly works. Compiling the kernel is basic, if you break that, fundamentally speaking you have broken the entire system.
"I can't even find one supporting nouveau over nvidia's own for stability and performance."
And you are still pretending it provides that? When you just admitted it wont even compile? How do you maintain such doublethink without snapping something inside?
Seriously, out one side of your mouth you pretend to acknowledge the points I just made, but out of the other you blather on about the 'superiority' of a solution we just established flat out does not work.
And then you deride their efforts to put out a system that actually has a proper driver for your hardware, as somehow 'philosophically pure?' I am not sure why that would be a bad thing but it's ludicrously out of place anyway. Real drivers should always be preferred precisely because the end goal is to practical - ensuring we can make our boxes work, today and tomorrow.
As we just established, you absolutely cannot do that with a binary.
"There's no mention of them in the statute, and it's solely due to SCOTUS interpretation."
SCOTUS' logic here is good. Patents are specifically for inventions, not discoveries.
" Accordingly, it may be an error to read too much into that interpretation, and suggest that no method performed by a computer could ever be patent eligible. For example, the Alice Bank opinion seems to suggest that a method performed by the computer that improves the working of the computer would be patentable - e.g. data compression methods, encryption schemes, data transmission improvements, etc.: "[Alice Bank's] method claims do not, for example, purport to improve the functioning of the computer itself.""
It's an interesting passage but I think you read too much into it. They are simply distinguishing the case they are ruling on from the cases they are not ruling on.
If a patent purported to improve the functioning of the computer itself, perhaps it would be valid. Or perhaps not. Being that the patent in front of them in this case did not, they did not rule on that question. (And reading the decision, they do show more nuance than most give them credit for. It's quite possible if such a case came up they would be able to understand that software is math by the time they ruled on it.)
"No it really isn't. i run it on several linux boxes"
Not surprising with a small sample and homogenous hardware, and not particularly meaningful either. Others find it much less reliable.
Now try just getting it to work, forget about not crashing, but to work at all on a new kernel, or a new architecture. It aint happening.
This is what happens when you accept non-free drivers. Maybe, absolute best case, it works fine for a subset of users. It will never serve the rest, and we will never be able to fix its bugs, extend it, improve it, or maintain it. If you use it you lose the ability to upgrade or improve your own system as well.
Far too high a price to pay for fancy graphics. But fortunately you dont have to pay that price. Nouveau is more than good enough for most people right now (much like the blob) but it does not share the long-term disabilities.
Personally I have found that AMD and Nvidia usually work well enough for me using real drivers, and Intel works flawlessly. Intel has sold a few more units as a result. Good to see nouveau making progress though, it's always good to have more choices.
The process language was aimed at chemistry originally, with the aim to make patentable novel and useful chemical processes. The courts have recognized it would be idiocy if read literally and generally declined to do so. But even with it in, it is not a free pass on the rest of the requirements, one of which is that mathematical algorithms are explicitly excluded.
So you have one part of the analysis that says maybe (a process could qualify - but not every process does) and that cannot be used to override the definite 'no's (mathematical algorithms are not patentable and a general purpose computer does absolutely nothing else.)
"On the contrary, processes are one of the statutory categories in 35 USC 101, and algorithms are processes. The only ones that aren't patentable are the subset of "mathematical algorithms". "
We are talking about mathematical algorithms. That's the only kind a computer can process.
"You could embody the algorithm in an FPGA and it would be a patentable device... But when you have the same exact algorithm in a self-configuring processor, it's not? How does that make sense?"
Because a specific device may be patentable subject matter, while the algorithm itself is not, and the combination of an algorithm with a general purpose computer is an obvious application of the general purpose computer as soon as the algorithm is known.
So you happen to have one of the cards it crashes on. I can understand being annoyed by that.
But look at the big picture, please. The binary driver is a buggy POS on any system, and will never be anything else. The nouveau driver gives a viable way to support this hardware properly. Sure it still crashes on some cards. Bug reports are needed to identify the issues and fix them. The point here is this is software that CAN be fixed, unlike a binary that cant even be USED in many cases, let alone fixed.
"Add on top of that the fact that Mint devs also removed Ubuntu's boot menu option to install Linux before X starts,"
Well ok that part of it is truly retarded, I agree. Requiring X for your installer is a real rookie move and it's hilarious how many supposedly competent distros fall for it.
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Sorry, gotta contradict you on that. Roundabouts scale better with more traffic, not worse. Seen it in action many times. And if you think roundabouts have to be single-lane, think again. I've seen them 5, 6 lanes across, with traffic lights. They are confusing at first if you are not used to them, but they actually work noticeably more smoothly once you become accustomed.
"THe banking industry is probably wanting a step up in security, while the NSA under Alexander had horrible internal security. Alexander's forte seems to be using brute force to break the security of others, not actually keeping an organization secure."
Perhaps that's his pitch?
The best defense is a good offense. Instead of fixing your security flaws, just make sure that getting to important systems will take some time, and be detected. Then wait for attacks to start, counterattack, and wipe out the attackers before they can get to the goodies.
Unfortunately while that sounds like a great movie plot it sounds like a really bad way to try and secure billions of dollars.
I dont know where you got that but I have studied human evolution a bit and dont recall ever seeing such an assertion. Humans are adaptable and certain groups are very good fishermen, but there is no evidence I am aware of that fishing was ever more than a minority lifeway, or a supplemental skill. There was a time when significant human expansions occurred through a 'beach-comber' style of gathering, but that was MUCH too recent to have had anything to do with the evolution of the brain, which was already done long before.
And the other apes HAVE evolved brains very much like ours, btw. Far more like ours than like anything else.
"If it had been the exact same situation, just a combination lock on on physical file cabinet in his office, once a proper court subpena was issued Law Enforcement might have asked for the combination as a courtesy but would have been perfectly within their rights to simply cut the thing open."
The only difference appears to be that the LE agency involved purports to be incapable of 'cutting the lock.'
Well that and the unwise statements made to police by the defendant voluntarily. It would be interesting if a similar case could be constructed with an un-cuttable physical lock, but of course such things do not exist...
The ruling appears flawed, I sympathize with the dissent, but yeah. This guy screwed himself, in typical lawyer fashion, with excess arrogance.
He did not have to tell the police anything here, he has probably lectured his clients many times on exactly why they should never talk to the police, does not matter if you have nothing to hide, does not matter if you think you have done nothing wrong, and if you have done something but think you can talk your way out of it you are a fool. Ask for your lawyer then shut your mouth, and do not answer any questions, I dont care if they ask you about the weather, the reply is 'ask my lawyer.'
From the language used in the opinion, if he had simply shut his mouth and not started bragging/volunteering information, he would be in a very different situation today.
Neanderthals do not appear to have been a fully separate species, but rather a subspecies or race of humans.
It does require some protein but that does not require exclusive or even preferential meat eating. Apes typically supplement a primarily fruit and veggie diet with various types of easy to acquire "meat" - insects of various types, termites in particular, are commonly consumed for supplemental protein. Larger animals are killed by Apes very rarely, and consumption of the corpses is even rarer, not entirely unheard of but certainly not part of the normal diet.
I didnt see the movie the other poster mentioned, but I know the Hmong nonetheless. If you are older you might remember them as the 'Montagnards' or mountain men who allied with the US in Vietnam. Quite a few made it out and settled in the US at the end.
Only someone who knew nothing at all on the subject would have thought they were carnivores. No apes are carnivores!
The interesting parts of the article didnt make it into the headline. As usual.
"It's not just that they ate veggies, they cooked them. Was there any other animal which we know that cooked its own food besides us?"
If you expand 'cooked' to the more generic 'prepared' then plenty of animals would qualify. In fact if you consider things like pickled herring and kimchee 'cooked' then we could probably argue that many animals do cook their food - crocodiles, for instance, are known to stash their kills in underwater caches for long periods before eating which 'cooks' the flesh using the chemical processes of decomposition, the resulting meal is roughly as 'cooked' as lutfisk or surströmming.
But no, I cannot think of any animals outside of hominids that have learned to start and control fires, which is a prerequisite for 'cooking' in most senses.
"Yes, but you can't build the wall just to survive prevailing winds, what happens if it *does* get hit by a tornado?"
Presumably one section of the wall would be badly damaged. It would still be a relatively small section, and I would guess the wall would probably continue to function effectively even with several small sections taken out of it.
I'm not saying the idea isnt ridiculous and impractical - just that it isnt ridiculous and impractical for the reasons the guy I was replying to gave.
"Speaking of incomparable, I fail to see how you would classify an F5 tornado as "some wind"."
He isnt talking about a wall to stop tornadoes. He's talking about a wall to stop tornadoes *from forming.*
Except as you said the hoover dam is far from uniform, it varies from 45 to 600 feet thick, and the walls themselves are only part of it - a large part of that cost has to do with the turbines and generators and associated machinery, not just the walls. Plus you have that whole deal about diverting a major river during construction, and of course the whole "we are turning the river back afterwards and making a lake" thing adds requirements and expenses as well.
That's pretty clearly not comparable to something very uniform that only needs to stand on dry land and obstruct some wind.
It's not just the Supremes, all courts were originally supposed to take such a broad view, and sometimes do. But more typically, they will make what they see as a legally conservative ruling even when they can clearly see it is wrong, and rationalize that it is the higher courts job to reverse them.
" Finally, I'd also like to point out that while the US abides by the Geneva convention and other treaties and accords, it is not a signatory of the same, so while the Geneva convention sets good rules, the US is only bound to them as long as they voluntarily comply."
This is absolutely incorrect.
The US is a party to all 4 Geneva conventions, and one additional protocol (protocol 3.) These have been ratified by the Senate and are law of the land.
The benefit is only asymmetric if you (as Comcast appears to do) define 'fulfilling our contractual obligations to our customers' as a non-benefit.
Comcast sees more benefit in refusing to provide the service they are being paid for than in living up to their obligations, and that's the big problem here. The fact that they have no effective competition for most of their customers is a big part of why. The fact that they provide their own services at higher margins that compete with third party services accessible on the internet is the other big piece of it.
Both problems could be solved at once by simply making it law that ISPs have to be ISPs, and cannot be part of a larger business. Existing conglomerates like Comcast would have a period of time to spin off the ISP service which would from that point forward be ONLY an ISP and statutorily disallowed from acquiring or being acquired by other sorts of businesses.
And yes, I am a free market 'fanatic' so to some this will be a shocking view from me, but 1. the existing market is far from free and 2. a simple statutory restriction is a lot better than giving more regulatory power to the bureaucrats which will only be captured.
IMOP the two subjects that are critical here and get neglected are logic and number theory. Logic typically gets covered as a first or second year course in college - after many years of courses that depend on it. Teaching it much earlier would make more sense and result in better comprehension of other subjects.
Number theory is, in my experience, the branch of mathematics most relevant to programming. Far more relevant than either calculus or statistics, and (for me at least) much easier as well. Like logic it's really foundational for a lot of other stuff. Yet it's essentially unheard of. No?
"So, again, where is anyone but you claiming things don't compile?"
It's not something you can contest, it's known and obvious. You cant compile it because you do not get the source.
The source for a shim whose only purpose is to load a binary into the kernel where a driver should have gone instead is certainly not a substitute, let alone a good substitute.
"And to be frank, I care a LOT more about things working, than being able to examine 100% of the source code."
It's a false dichotomy you (and many others) setup here, trying to claim pragmatism. It's not pragmatism though, it's simply short-sightedness combined with laziness.
"X works well enough for me, with my stuff, right now, today." There's your 'pragmatic' justification for being lazy. A real pragmatist would be concerned about how it would work with the next stuff he gets, and the stuff after that, and someone who is not intellectually lazy would certainly have some serious concerns about corrupting an otherwise Free system by integrating a black-box binary directly to the kernel, to say the least.
Frankly this is the sort of thing that should cause alarm bells to go off inside your head so hard you fall to the ground clutching your bleeding ears - solely as a pragmatist. If you had any intellectual commitment to Free Software that might intensify it even further, but it's certainly not needed.
"Unless you're using a platform that isn't a PC"
Oh bullsquat. A PC is a Personal Computer. I am in my fourth decade of using PCs, and I have used PCs with many diverse architectures, build around chips ranging from the Z80 and x86 to Motorola 68k, MIPS, Alpha, etc. Hardware changes almost as often as skirt lengths, and often for similar reasons. A system that will work in that environment MUST include real, human-readable code, not a brittle binary written for a single monad out of the entire universe of hardware and software combinations.
What you were trying to say is 'unless you are using something other than the currently popular x86 compatible intel/amd hardware' which leaves a LOT more room outside it, but even that is not actually accurate - even if you are using exactly that it STILL wont work properly. You can claim otherwise all you want, but you admitted it does not compile so you are only contradicting yourself at this point.
That's a show stopper bug right there, absolutely unacceptable. "Works as long as you do not use the system" does not describe something that truly works. Compiling the kernel is basic, if you break that, fundamentally speaking you have broken the entire system.
"I can't even find one supporting nouveau over nvidia's own for stability and performance."
And you are still pretending it provides that? When you just admitted it wont even compile? How do you maintain such doublethink without snapping something inside?
Seriously, out one side of your mouth you pretend to acknowledge the points I just made, but out of the other you blather on about the 'superiority' of a solution we just established flat out does not work.
And then you deride their efforts to put out a system that actually has a proper driver for your hardware, as somehow 'philosophically pure?' I am not sure why that would be a bad thing but it's ludicrously out of place anyway. Real drivers should always be preferred precisely because the end goal is to practical - ensuring we can make our boxes work, today and tomorrow.
As we just established, you absolutely cannot do that with a binary.
"There's no mention of them in the statute, and it's solely due to SCOTUS interpretation."
SCOTUS' logic here is good. Patents are specifically for inventions, not discoveries.
" Accordingly, it may be an error to read too much into that interpretation, and suggest that no method performed by a computer could ever be patent eligible. For example, the Alice Bank opinion seems to suggest that a method performed by the computer that improves the working of the computer would be patentable - e.g. data compression methods, encryption schemes, data transmission improvements, etc.: "[Alice Bank's] method claims do not, for example, purport to improve the functioning of the computer itself.""
It's an interesting passage but I think you read too much into it. They are simply distinguishing the case they are ruling on from the cases they are not ruling on.
If a patent purported to improve the functioning of the computer itself, perhaps it would be valid. Or perhaps not. Being that the patent in front of them in this case did not, they did not rule on that question. (And reading the decision, they do show more nuance than most give them credit for. It's quite possible if such a case came up they would be able to understand that software is math by the time they ruled on it.)
"No it really isn't. i run it on several linux boxes"
Not surprising with a small sample and homogenous hardware, and not particularly meaningful either. Others find it much less reliable.
Now try just getting it to work, forget about not crashing, but to work at all on a new kernel, or a new architecture. It aint happening.
This is what happens when you accept non-free drivers. Maybe, absolute best case, it works fine for a subset of users. It will never serve the rest, and we will never be able to fix its bugs, extend it, improve it, or maintain it. If you use it you lose the ability to upgrade or improve your own system as well.
Far too high a price to pay for fancy graphics. But fortunately you dont have to pay that price. Nouveau is more than good enough for most people right now (much like the blob) but it does not share the long-term disabilities.
Personally I have found that AMD and Nvidia usually work well enough for me using real drivers, and Intel works flawlessly. Intel has sold a few more units as a result. Good to see nouveau making progress though, it's always good to have more choices.
The process language was aimed at chemistry originally, with the aim to make patentable novel and useful chemical processes. The courts have recognized it would be idiocy if read literally and generally declined to do so. But even with it in, it is not a free pass on the rest of the requirements, one of which is that mathematical algorithms are explicitly excluded.
So you have one part of the analysis that says maybe (a process could qualify - but not every process does) and that cannot be used to override the definite 'no's (mathematical algorithms are not patentable and a general purpose computer does absolutely nothing else.)
"On the contrary, processes are one of the statutory categories in 35 USC 101, and algorithms are processes. The only ones that aren't patentable are the subset of "mathematical algorithms". "
We are talking about mathematical algorithms. That's the only kind a computer can process.
"You could embody the algorithm in an FPGA and it would be a patentable device... But when you have the same exact algorithm in a self-configuring processor, it's not? How does that make sense?"
Because a specific device may be patentable subject matter, while the algorithm itself is not, and the combination of an algorithm with a general purpose computer is an obvious application of the general purpose computer as soon as the algorithm is known.
Seriously, how does that not make perfect sense?
So you happen to have one of the cards it crashes on. I can understand being annoyed by that.
But look at the big picture, please. The binary driver is a buggy POS on any system, and will never be anything else. The nouveau driver gives a viable way to support this hardware properly. Sure it still crashes on some cards. Bug reports are needed to identify the issues and fix them. The point here is this is software that CAN be fixed, unlike a binary that cant even be USED in many cases, let alone fixed.
"Add on top of that the fact that Mint devs also removed Ubuntu's boot menu option to install Linux before X starts,"
Well ok that part of it is truly retarded, I agree. Requiring X for your installer is a real rookie move and it's hilarious how many supposedly competent distros fall for it.