It wont make you look good if you are from an area that the reviewer stigmatises. That is the point. Where are they going to get these reviewers from? Do you really think they will be able to, or even try to, distinguish between someone who simply comes from an area with a dialect they stigmatise, and someone who actually has a speech problem?
I foresee it being nothing more than an excuse to purge people of certain origins in favour of those from others, and to institutionalise prejudice.
When you pluck even 1 teacher how can't be understood out of the system it's worth it.
Worth what? Worth purging dozens of excellent teachers who happen to speak with an 'accent' that an arbitrary reviewer finds objectionable? I don't think it's worth that.
If a teacher truly "can't be understood" I would think HR should have noticed.
As far as teachers go, the one that I had the most difficulty simply understanding was a Nigerian. He was also one of my best teachers ever, and his enunciation was far MORE clear than is normal in american English. It was much closer to RP in many ways, he enunciated every syllable clearly, in all honesty he was one of the clearest speakers I have ever heard. But it was so different from what we were used to hearing that people did have major difficulty understanding him at first. For me it was 3 class periods, towards the end of the third my ears finally adjusted and I could understand what he was saying.
Many people I met in the UK, on the other hand, have incredibly sloppy enunciation, complete with collapsing whole series of consonants together (mah bruvver) yet I never had that kind of difficulty understanding them.
Why? Well it stands to reason I have heard a lot more UK English than Nigerian English through tv, radio, etc. and at a much earlier age.
As long as a teacher can speak clearly and has the required grasp of literary English (which is a non-spoken specialty dialect itself, learned from books) I really dont think anyone should care what sort of dialect he speaks with. The younger a child is when first exposed to varying dialects the better, and the easier for their brain to correctly configure itself to make sense of speech across variations anyway.
The problem isnt the idea of checking to make sure everyone can speak clearly - the problem is that practically speaking it is extremely unlikely to be implemented without inappropriate bias dominating the outcomes.
I am pretty sure a lot of variants on that story will be happening. Arizona has a pretty diverse population, with parts dating back to long before English was ever heard in the region and other parts moving in from other regions on a daily basis. The local accent features a reduced and simplified phonetic inventory inherited from the substrate. Local judges will find most other US dialects somewhat unclear, because they express a larger phonetic inventory than they normally distinguish. Imported judges will find the local dialect deficient as well, because it doesnt preserve every distinction they expect it to preserve. If anyone manages to look past their regional prejudices and actually deal with the real language problems in a truly neutral way it will be a miracle.
Everyone has an accent. The English language is spoken natively all around the world, of course there are going to be differences in pronunciation.
What you are doing, and what it sounds like the school is doing, is conflating the idea of an accent with the idea of speaking unclearly.
The latter is a real problem, but it has absolutely nothing to do with regional/accent differences in pronunciation. It's quite possible to speak any dialect relatively clearly, or unclearly.
These two things are very commonly conflated, however, particularly by those who also believe the host of popular language fairy tales. And this is why I suspect the program in question actually should be shut down as a violation of the civil rights of the teachers.
If they are truly and only working on clarity of speech alone, that is one thing, and fine and good. But every time I have seen anything like this being done it has gone far beyond clarity of speech, and instead expresses a preference for a particular dialect, and varying degrees of disapproval for others, regardless of clarity of speech (and regardless of mastery or abject lack thereof of Literary English.)
Courts don't (and shouldnt) rule on issues not required to dispose of the case in front of them - they are for actual disputes, not theoretical ones. So this court cannot rule on the Constitutional question in this case, it would be improper as it is not necessary. Therefore they stopped just short of it, ruling that whether or not the action was unconstitutional, the teacher personally had absolutely no way of anticipating that beforehand.
This leaves the door open to sue the teachers employer for it instead, if we really have to go there. In this case I can see how that looks like a bad thing, but I would still argue that on the whole it's still the right way to do things.
Actually you can do a hell of a lot in 32k. My first computer only came with 2k!
You just cant do much if you are relying on the absurdly wasteful programming environments that are so popular today. In fact it appears to me that yearly increases in computer power have been used almost exclusively to shield todays programmers from the need to actually learn to program. Excluding video/graphics stuff that would have required absurdly expensive specialty hardware at the time, I did pretty much the same things with that computer that I do today with a computer that has one million times as much RAM, and similar improvements on all the other specs, and it worked just fine.
What I do remember was that with Sawfish, the seams between it and the rest of GNOME still showed. It had its own control center, for example.
You say that like it's a bad thing. That's exactly the sort of b0rked thinking I am talking about.
What you appear NOT to be remembering is that GNOME 1 was intentionally WM-agnostic, it had an open interface that any and every WM was welcome to use, so the user was in no way stuck with Sawfish. I didnt care much for Sawfish myself, and other than trying it out and coming to that conclusion, I never used it. You didnt have to, you could use whatever you wanted.
In short, Metacity's integration with GNOME was far more seamless, and for users who didn't want to dick around with configuration and didn't even know that a focus model other than "Click to Focus" even existed, Metacity was perfectly adequate.
Sure. Those same users dont even know *nix exists either, and they certainly dont use it. So GNOME decided to screw their entire existing userbase in order to serve... the people that are least likely to ever use it.
Removing choices, removing interoperability, discouraging/making impossible user customisation, hiding the real attributes of the file system behind a facade... there are a few specifics to get you started.
It was no panacea. 'Ugly' is a subjective judgement, I found the default ugly (but no uglier than the defaults I have seen on later versions) but at least it was open to direction.
The point, though, was it had a decent architecture at the core, one built around openness and interoperability and allowing the user to control their own box. All principles that the GNOME project clearly wants nothing to do with these days.
Uh, no, I wouldnt say that to you. And I certainly wasnt trying to poke fun at you personally. I know nothing about you. And lots of older posters have high UIDs.
Regardless whether or not you personally were around to see the first GNOME or not, many people now crying about GNOME 3 certainly were. I was more laughing at the collective stupidity of humanity than trying to single you or anyone else out.
But it's a fact. There once was a GNOME that was designed with user needs in mind. It was customisable and flexible. You could set *nix keyboard shortcuts and use a real WM with it, and while even the very last version lacked a bit of polish the design was pretty solid.
That design was thrown in the toilet in favour of one that consciously aimed to make everything good about it go away - forget about preserving sane shortcut keys, we decide, you comply! Repeated entreaties from users to simply restore the functionality that would allow them to *partially* undo this received rude answers. WM choice? Forget that noise. You use what we tell you to or you can screw off. The file manager? Don't even get me started. An interface to a hierarchical file system that attempts at every turn to make it look like something else? And on top of that the same program is also supposed to be your web browser? I hadnt imagined anything could be worse than IE, but Nautilus proved me wrong.
You personally may not have known the history, but lots of people did, and they get no sympathy from me now, upset that this same group of people who have already proved once that they hate *nix and hate their users would pull the exact same stunt a second time? Excuse me my chortle, and understand that it isnt aimed at you personally.
I still find it utterly unreasonable to just scrap the Gnome 2 desktop. It was the most stable, "just works" DE for *nix, and they just threw all that work out for eye candy. I tried to like Gnome 3 but it feels more like a toy than KDE4 did when it came out. It makes me wonder how many thousands of development hours were just flushed down the toilet for this. I could understand it if they used Gnome2 as the foundation, and added to it, but they didn't.
I really got a chuckle out of this. A wise man said "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" and GNOME is posterchild for that saying. The GNOME 1.x series had a lot of potential and was starting to be really usable when they scratched it entirely in favour of GNOME2. It wasnt just that 2 was released in a very early unusable state, though that was true too - but deeper design level decisions consistently ensured that, even once the bugs were worked out and the project more finished, it would certainly never be useful for me. Sure, if I had forced myself to use it for all the intervening years I suppose I could have gotten used to it - the way people eventually get used to having leprosy or chronic excema. But why would I do that to myself, and why would anyone else? Even if you agreed with the design atrocities involved in GNOME2, surely seeing that transition should have warned you that they would just scrap it and make something even more monstrous once it started to get properly polished.
And now all you fools that stuck with them through 2, submitted to their control of your computer, taught yourself to work with their broken interface and even convinced yourself it was an improvement... now they tell you to get screwed and just break it all again. I laugh.
I can say whatever I want to say. Just try and stop me:P
When copyright laws were invented, printing presses were very expensive things that few owned. Copyright laws were therefore de facto restrictions on businesses that had little to no affect on private individuals as a result. Over time as technology has progressed, the technology has improved, and the price of the equipment needed to effectively violate a copyright has decreased dramatically, so that copyright laws now affect a great many people that would never have had to worry about them when they were invented. It is not illogical to make a distinction between application of copyright law to businesses who are violating copyright for a profit, and individual 'infringers' whose activity is of a noticeably different nature.
I agree that it is just as stupid to refer to this as piracy as it is to refer to any other case of copyright infringement as piracy. Arr.
That said, this does appear to be a very clear-cut case of copyright infringement, and it's a for profit company trying to extract money for someone elses work here, *precisely* the sort of case where copyright law is most defensible.
You arent paying for only 3gb to begin with though. Guaranteed. The manufacturer paid for the 4th gb and therefore is absolutely certain to pass that cost on to you. So you paid for 4gb, then they want to get paid a second time to actually let you use it. Sleezy at best.
Well GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, it's 2011 now, so if you are correct it they should stop screwing things up by about 2020. By that time their entire code-base will be completely unusable and a restart from scratch will be the only solution. (Probably past that point already.) So GNOME should be back at the rough-but-usable stage by 2022.
It's my understanding that a fragment survives of Sosylus' Deeds of Hannibal, which was written by someone who lived at the same time and travelled with Hannibal.
The last time I checked the wiki article it is actually pretty fair to an extent, but you have to use some brainpower of your own in drawing conclusions.
The earliest evidence depicts Christians as already widespread, and merely repeats hearsay from the Christians themselves. Nothing dates before 30ce. Then there is Paul, and the Gospel Jesus comes still later. Josephus has two citations, one everyone knows is an interpolation, the other is often defended by Christians but it is weak, and also almost certainly an interpolation. So no, nothing they cite actually qualifies as the sort of contemporary mention that we find for people like Pontius Pilate and Hannibal and Socrates and Philo Judaeus and Rashbi and Jesus ben Panthera and so forth and so on.
I did read the link you sent. I havent read Nailed so I dont have much comment to make on it, but certainly the use of a few emotive snarl-words is not a substitute for actually dealing with Doherty's arguments.
Also, his extraordinary nature is not necessarily a function of the miracles, belief in, etc. We dont have to take an issue on the existence of miracles to expect any historical Jesus to have been at the very least a popular preacher who drew huge crowds on many occasions, who founded Christianity, a cult already known to and loathed by the Roman authorities early in the first century.
People like that did tend to get written about in stuff that's preserved. I wouldnt pretend that absence of evidence makes evidence of absence, but neither does it make well-established fact. Since you agree with that you have endorsed my argument, thanks!:D
Bringing up Hannibal is wierd since we do have a contemporary documentary reference to him, and moreso because we know he was so famous that the book it is taken from was written while he yet lived, and an ancient best-seller, even if we no longer have a complete copy today.
This shows exactly what real evidence of someones existence would look like, and shows it was possible. And it's possible for many people of significantly less stature than Hannibals. For the sort of "historical Jesus" that the Jesus Seminar imagines? I gotta think he would have at least a 50/50 chance. But whatever you think of the chances, it's simply a fact that the evidence is not there, and that was all I was pointing out.
What I was saying, and I believe fyngyrz as well, is not that #1 isnt true because #2 isnt true. What we are saying is there is simply put no clear evidence of #1. And it's true. Literally EVERYTHING about him is written either by Paul (fr Saul) who never met him as a man but converted on the road to Damascus some years after his death, or else is written even later.
Once you rule out stuff written long after he died, and a couple of christian insertians in Josephus, there is nothing at all to prove that he existed.
It may be objected that I have set myself an unreasonably easy task, as you couldnt prove that most of the people alive in those years ever lived either of course, but he was supposed to have been someone rather more extraordinary than many of the ancients about whom we have real evidence, and I did not set the task for myself in any case. I simply responded to someone who ignorantly asserted that it is a well-proven fact. It is not.
There were plenty of people in that time/space vicinity named Jesus (or rather, Yeshua,) of course. It was a very popular name in Syria Palestina. But a single one that could be definitively matched up with the gospel Jesus simply isnt in evidence. There were several "Jesuses" in the vicinity from the period 250bc-20bc about whom one form of story or another was preserved, in fact. But none of them seem to match up with the gospel Jesus.
Actually, there is plenty of evidence that Jesus existed,
No, actually, there isnt. Feel free to prove me wrong, if you have 'plenty' of evidence it shouldnt be hard to cite some. It needs to be contemperaneous (which rules out the Old Testament and the Church Fathers, all of whom were at the very least many decades after the time) and we need someone that actually fits that new testament story in whole, not just in parts (Yeshua Ben Pantera for instance is a partial fit but clearly not a full one.)
I have been using linux since '96 and never seen most of the stuff you are claiming happen. Updates are particularly compelling when the software is free, but you sound manic about it. "as we have all seen unpatched^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h software can be pwned, no matter the OS. " - fixed that for you. You gotta catch your breath and think it through. Windows update *does* break stuff at times too, and if a distro really breaks stuff like that on updates then ffs get a different distro!
Debian gets a pretty long life cycle, and since you dont mind to configure it Slackware is actually great. You can setup your own repository and screen updates if you want. The only thing they wont do is keep you supplied with security fixes indefinitely. Pat only does the last three versions at any given time. But he does give you the tools to do it yourself with whatever version(s) you want to support. Not bad for a product you dont have to pay for!
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In what dreamworld do you live again?
It wont make you look good if you are from an area that the reviewer stigmatises. That is the point. Where are they going to get these reviewers from? Do you really think they will be able to, or even try to, distinguish between someone who simply comes from an area with a dialect they stigmatise, and someone who actually has a speech problem?
I foresee it being nothing more than an excuse to purge people of certain origins in favour of those from others, and to institutionalise prejudice.
Worth what? Worth purging dozens of excellent teachers who happen to speak with an 'accent' that an arbitrary reviewer finds objectionable? I don't think it's worth that.
If a teacher truly "can't be understood" I would think HR should have noticed.
As far as teachers go, the one that I had the most difficulty simply understanding was a Nigerian. He was also one of my best teachers ever, and his enunciation was far MORE clear than is normal in american English. It was much closer to RP in many ways, he enunciated every syllable clearly, in all honesty he was one of the clearest speakers I have ever heard. But it was so different from what we were used to hearing that people did have major difficulty understanding him at first. For me it was 3 class periods, towards the end of the third my ears finally adjusted and I could understand what he was saying.
Many people I met in the UK, on the other hand, have incredibly sloppy enunciation, complete with collapsing whole series of consonants together (mah bruvver) yet I never had that kind of difficulty understanding them.
Why? Well it stands to reason I have heard a lot more UK English than Nigerian English through tv, radio, etc. and at a much earlier age.
As long as a teacher can speak clearly and has the required grasp of literary English (which is a non-spoken specialty dialect itself, learned from books) I really dont think anyone should care what sort of dialect he speaks with. The younger a child is when first exposed to varying dialects the better, and the easier for their brain to correctly configure itself to make sense of speech across variations anyway.
The problem isnt the idea of checking to make sure everyone can speak clearly - the problem is that practically speaking it is extremely unlikely to be implemented without inappropriate bias dominating the outcomes.
I am pretty sure a lot of variants on that story will be happening. Arizona has a pretty diverse population, with parts dating back to long before English was ever heard in the region and other parts moving in from other regions on a daily basis. The local accent features a reduced and simplified phonetic inventory inherited from the substrate. Local judges will find most other US dialects somewhat unclear, because they express a larger phonetic inventory than they normally distinguish. Imported judges will find the local dialect deficient as well, because it doesnt preserve every distinction they expect it to preserve. If anyone manages to look past their regional prejudices and actually deal with the real language problems in a truly neutral way it will be a miracle.
Everyone has an accent. The English language is spoken natively all around the world, of course there are going to be differences in pronunciation.
What you are doing, and what it sounds like the school is doing, is conflating the idea of an accent with the idea of speaking unclearly.
The latter is a real problem, but it has absolutely nothing to do with regional/accent differences in pronunciation. It's quite possible to speak any dialect relatively clearly, or unclearly.
These two things are very commonly conflated, however, particularly by those who also believe the host of popular language fairy tales. And this is why I suspect the program in question actually should be shut down as a violation of the civil rights of the teachers.
If they are truly and only working on clarity of speech alone, that is one thing, and fine and good. But every time I have seen anything like this being done it has gone far beyond clarity of speech, and instead expresses a preference for a particular dialect, and varying degrees of disapproval for others, regardless of clarity of speech (and regardless of mastery or abject lack thereof of Literary English.)
You read incorrectly.
Courts don't (and shouldnt) rule on issues not required to dispose of the case in front of them - they are for actual disputes, not theoretical ones. So this court cannot rule on the Constitutional question in this case, it would be improper as it is not necessary. Therefore they stopped just short of it, ruling that whether or not the action was unconstitutional, the teacher personally had absolutely no way of anticipating that beforehand.
This leaves the door open to sue the teachers employer for it instead, if we really have to go there. In this case I can see how that looks like a bad thing, but I would still argue that on the whole it's still the right way to do things.
Actually you can do a hell of a lot in 32k. My first computer only came with 2k!
You just cant do much if you are relying on the absurdly wasteful programming environments that are so popular today. In fact it appears to me that yearly increases in computer power have been used almost exclusively to shield todays programmers from the need to actually learn to program. Excluding video/graphics stuff that would have required absurdly expensive specialty hardware at the time, I did pretty much the same things with that computer that I do today with a computer that has one million times as much RAM, and similar improvements on all the other specs, and it worked just fine.
You say that like it's a bad thing. That's exactly the sort of b0rked thinking I am talking about.
What you appear NOT to be remembering is that GNOME 1 was intentionally WM-agnostic, it had an open interface that any and every WM was welcome to use, so the user was in no way stuck with Sawfish. I didnt care much for Sawfish myself, and other than trying it out and coming to that conclusion, I never used it. You didnt have to, you could use whatever you wanted.
Sure. Those same users dont even know *nix exists either, and they certainly dont use it. So GNOME decided to screw their entire existing userbase in order to serve... the people that are least likely to ever use it.
Removing choices, removing interoperability, discouraging/making impossible user customisation, hiding the real attributes of the file system behind a facade... there are a few specifics to get you started.
It was no panacea. 'Ugly' is a subjective judgement, I found the default ugly (but no uglier than the defaults I have seen on later versions) but at least it was open to direction.
The point, though, was it had a decent architecture at the core, one built around openness and interoperability and allowing the user to control their own box. All principles that the GNOME project clearly wants nothing to do with these days.
Uh, no, I wouldnt say that to you. And I certainly wasnt trying to poke fun at you personally. I know nothing about you. And lots of older posters have high UIDs.
Regardless whether or not you personally were around to see the first GNOME or not, many people now crying about GNOME 3 certainly were. I was more laughing at the collective stupidity of humanity than trying to single you or anyone else out.
But it's a fact. There once was a GNOME that was designed with user needs in mind. It was customisable and flexible. You could set *nix keyboard shortcuts and use a real WM with it, and while even the very last version lacked a bit of polish the design was pretty solid.
That design was thrown in the toilet in favour of one that consciously aimed to make everything good about it go away - forget about preserving sane shortcut keys, we decide, you comply! Repeated entreaties from users to simply restore the functionality that would allow them to *partially* undo this received rude answers. WM choice? Forget that noise. You use what we tell you to or you can screw off. The file manager? Don't even get me started. An interface to a hierarchical file system that attempts at every turn to make it look like something else? And on top of that the same program is also supposed to be your web browser? I hadnt imagined anything could be worse than IE, but Nautilus proved me wrong.
You personally may not have known the history, but lots of people did, and they get no sympathy from me now, upset that this same group of people who have already proved once that they hate *nix and hate their users would pull the exact same stunt a second time? Excuse me my chortle, and understand that it isnt aimed at you personally.
I really got a chuckle out of this. A wise man said "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" and GNOME is posterchild for that saying. The GNOME 1.x series had a lot of potential and was starting to be really usable when they scratched it entirely in favour of GNOME2. It wasnt just that 2 was released in a very early unusable state, though that was true too - but deeper design level decisions consistently ensured that, even once the bugs were worked out and the project more finished, it would certainly never be useful for me. Sure, if I had forced myself to use it for all the intervening years I suppose I could have gotten used to it - the way people eventually get used to having leprosy or chronic excema. But why would I do that to myself, and why would anyone else? Even if you agreed with the design atrocities involved in GNOME2, surely seeing that transition should have warned you that they would just scrap it and make something even more monstrous once it started to get properly polished.
And now all you fools that stuck with them through 2, submitted to their control of your computer, taught yourself to work with their broken interface and even convinced yourself it was an improvement... now they tell you to get screwed and just break it all again. I laugh.
I can say whatever I want to say. Just try and stop me :P
When copyright laws were invented, printing presses were very expensive things that few owned. Copyright laws were therefore de facto restrictions on businesses that had little to no affect on private individuals as a result. Over time as technology has progressed, the technology has improved, and the price of the equipment needed to effectively violate a copyright has decreased dramatically, so that copyright laws now affect a great many people that would never have had to worry about them when they were invented. It is not illogical to make a distinction between application of copyright law to businesses who are violating copyright for a profit, and individual 'infringers' whose activity is of a noticeably different nature.
I agree that it is just as stupid to refer to this as piracy as it is to refer to any other case of copyright infringement as piracy. Arr.
That said, this does appear to be a very clear-cut case of copyright infringement, and it's a for profit company trying to extract money for someone elses work here, *precisely* the sort of case where copyright law is most defensible.
You arent paying for only 3gb to begin with though. Guaranteed. The manufacturer paid for the 4th gb and therefore is absolutely certain to pass that cost on to you. So you paid for 4gb, then they want to get paid a second time to actually let you use it. Sleezy at best.
In the middle of their bad turn eh?
Well GNOME 2.0 was released in 2002, it's 2011 now, so if you are correct it they should stop screwing things up by about 2020. By that time their entire code-base will be completely unusable and a restart from scratch will be the only solution. (Probably past that point already.) So GNOME should be back at the rough-but-usable stage by 2022.
Competent malware authors have been doing this for many years.
The news is the techniques are becoming more common even amongst the level that produces stuff Symantec can actually catch.
It's my understanding that a fragment survives of Sosylus' Deeds of Hannibal, which was written by someone who lived at the same time and travelled with Hannibal.
The last time I checked the wiki article it is actually pretty fair to an extent, but you have to use some brainpower of your own in drawing conclusions.
The earliest evidence depicts Christians as already widespread, and merely repeats hearsay from the Christians themselves. Nothing dates before 30ce. Then there is Paul, and the Gospel Jesus comes still later. Josephus has two citations, one everyone knows is an interpolation, the other is often defended by Christians but it is weak, and also almost certainly an interpolation. So no, nothing they cite actually qualifies as the sort of contemporary mention that we find for people like Pontius Pilate and Hannibal and Socrates and Philo Judaeus and Rashbi and Jesus ben Panthera and so forth and so on.
I did read the link you sent. I havent read Nailed so I dont have much comment to make on it, but certainly the use of a few emotive snarl-words is not a substitute for actually dealing with Doherty's arguments.
Also, his extraordinary nature is not necessarily a function of the miracles, belief in, etc. We dont have to take an issue on the existence of miracles to expect any historical Jesus to have been at the very least a popular preacher who drew huge crowds on many occasions, who founded Christianity, a cult already known to and loathed by the Roman authorities early in the first century.
People like that did tend to get written about in stuff that's preserved. I wouldnt pretend that absence of evidence makes evidence of absence, but neither does it make well-established fact. Since you agree with that you have endorsed my argument, thanks! :D
Bringing up Hannibal is wierd since we do have a contemporary documentary reference to him, and moreso because we know he was so famous that the book it is taken from was written while he yet lived, and an ancient best-seller, even if we no longer have a complete copy today.
This shows exactly what real evidence of someones existence would look like, and shows it was possible. And it's possible for many people of significantly less stature than Hannibals. For the sort of "historical Jesus" that the Jesus Seminar imagines? I gotta think he would have at least a 50/50 chance. But whatever you think of the chances, it's simply a fact that the evidence is not there, and that was all I was pointing out.
What I was saying, and I believe fyngyrz as well, is not that #1 isnt true because #2 isnt true. What we are saying is there is simply put no clear evidence of #1. And it's true. Literally EVERYTHING about him is written either by Paul (fr Saul) who never met him as a man but converted on the road to Damascus some years after his death, or else is written even later.
Once you rule out stuff written long after he died, and a couple of christian insertians in Josephus, there is nothing at all to prove that he existed.
It may be objected that I have set myself an unreasonably easy task, as you couldnt prove that most of the people alive in those years ever lived either of course, but he was supposed to have been someone rather more extraordinary than many of the ancients about whom we have real evidence, and I did not set the task for myself in any case. I simply responded to someone who ignorantly asserted that it is a well-proven fact. It is not.
There were plenty of people in that time/space vicinity named Jesus (or rather, Yeshua,) of course. It was a very popular name in Syria Palestina. But a single one that could be definitively matched up with the gospel Jesus simply isnt in evidence. There were several "Jesuses" in the vicinity from the period 250bc-20bc about whom one form of story or another was preserved, in fact. But none of them seem to match up with the gospel Jesus.
No, actually, there isnt. Feel free to prove me wrong, if you have 'plenty' of evidence it shouldnt be hard to cite some. It needs to be contemperaneous (which rules out the Old Testament and the Church Fathers, all of whom were at the very least many decades after the time) and we need someone that actually fits that new testament story in whole, not just in parts (Yeshua Ben Pantera for instance is a partial fit but clearly not a full one.)
It's been a couple years since I tried Kubuntu. At the time, it really didnt work very well at all. Glad to hear it's improved.
I have been using linux since '96 and never seen most of the stuff you are claiming happen. Updates are particularly compelling when the software is free, but you sound manic about it. "as we have all seen unpatched^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h software can be pwned, no matter the OS. " - fixed that for you. You gotta catch your breath and think it through. Windows update *does* break stuff at times too, and if a distro really breaks stuff like that on updates then ffs get a different distro!
Debian gets a pretty long life cycle, and since you dont mind to configure it Slackware is actually great. You can setup your own repository and screen updates if you want. The only thing they wont do is keep you supplied with security fixes indefinitely. Pat only does the last three versions at any given time. But he does give you the tools to do it yourself with whatever version(s) you want to support. Not bad for a product you dont have to pay for!