171 karma · joined February 22, 2017
The questions would have been written by middle aged men who were as unfamiliar with the pop-culture lives of 99 year olds as I was with theirs. So the questions were really low ball, and in a pinch, an encyclopedia could provide the answer instead of mom.
It violates Occam's Razor badly.
It is less plausible than life just starting on earth.
There is no good reason for adding the complexity of starting elsewhere, surviving being blasted off planetary surface, surviving long enough to reach earth, somehow reaching earth, surviving reentry, surviving alien conditions on earth, and somehow thriving... while the original source died off and/or cannot be found, if talking about Mars.
It is miraculous thinking, and has no place alongside more reasonable ideas.
But people —average people— do that for their food, their cars, their homes, their personal appearance. This includes clothes, hairstyles, after market pigmentations, permanent and temporary, as well as extra holes and plugs in their epidermis in all sorts of novel and creative ways.
They ask for customisation on their vacations, hotel stays, upgrades on airplane tickets and car rentals. People ask for concessions on their employment contracts, seek special arrangements for schooling, loans and mortgages.
Some even customise their computer hardware, slapping stickers on custom cases, adding fancy illumination, aftermarket cooling, fancier peripherals, upgrades, et cetera, ad nausea.
And companies jump at the chance to chance to service these requests.
But not commercial software and operating systems. They are special snowflakes apparently.
I and my peers are an incredibly small fraction of a percent? 2% anyway. But sure, ok, a small group.
But we're loud, and we're having it our way. We make sure people see us having it our way, so they will start asking to have it their way too. Whatever that way might be.
And it's working. Which is why that "incredibly small fraction of a percent" somehow motivated Microsoft to add bash to Windows. They weren't catering to average people. Or why there is growing interest in customising Mac OS. https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/61gdup/ricing_mac...
Example: Canada has about 1.08 billionaires per million people, while Sweden has 3.16. Norway, with its oil, performs more poorly, but still better than Canada: 2.69 billionaires per million people. Denmark is only slightly worse than Canada at 1.05.
Source of my information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_numbe...
If I had, I would have commented that the version upgrade process sucks for anyone that starts from a minimal base(like I do). If I go through the upgrade, I will end up with all the default stuff.
If I don't have thunderbird installed, don't install it for me.
In short: upgrades could be smarter, faster, better, stronger.
We don't want a coordinated anything. The Linux community practices "fork it for fun", at the drop of a Red Hat. That's one of its core values and it is antithetical to the desires of the vast majority of users.
Canonical's Unity Desktop is ok. I mean, I don't really care about it. Its not interesting. Its idea of a sandboxed, polished, branded experience gets in the way of interesting. I don't use it. I don't even install it.
That's my definition of Windows and OS X too.
Anyone with "leadership skills" and a business know-how realises that the Linux community is like a herd of cats, and there will be no marshalling us into contributing towards a cohesive and coordinated anything.
If we wanted to be corporate citizens, we would be happy with Windows and OS X. But we had that and thew it away. A proper corporate effort will be distrusted, cracked, forked, and rewritten if need be. Look at Android: we fight for our right to root it.
Gentlemen such as yourself may be happy with a corporate Linux presentation, but it ranges from uninteresting to offensive to many long term Linux users.