adamtaylor

A federal budget does not include how you're going to raise the money to pay for it. The thing that Romney was vague about was which tax loopholes he was going to close to pay for his budget. No Democratic senator proposed a budget in the last 3.5 years because their President did that for them, as is customary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_budget_process).Also, only the House has "the power of the purse", i.e. the right to propose spending bills. And of course Democratic senators voted on budgets during the last 3.5 years. All spending bills have to pass the Senate. Here is the Senate roll call for one of the FY 2012 appropriations bills, which passed the Senate on Nov 1, 2011: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_c... . Note that most Democrats voted "yea", and most Republicans voted "nay". Also, the article in question was not a "fact-check". It was article about fact-checking.

Have you tried the GNOME 3 "classic" desktop in Ubuntu? It's very similar to GNOME 2. So far it's worked out well for me.

I'm always intrigued by these claims that you can get something basically the same as a Mac for much cheaper. When I've investigated in the past (but in the OS X era---it seems generally accepted that Macs were sold at a hefty premium in the 80s and 90s), I've generally found the price difference to by in the ~10% neighborhood.

I just priced out a grossly-similar laptop to the Macbook Pro Retina at Dell's website, and came up with a Latitude E6520 with a price of $1931. Less than a Macbook Pro Retina by about 15%. The Latitude has a slightly faster processor, a graphics chip with half as much video memory, no retina display, weighs ~1.5 lbs more, and (I suspect) lacks Apple's all-around build quality.

However, a System 76 laptop with similar specs as the MBPR costs $1153. But that's with only the Intel HD 4000 graphics (no NVIDIA chip), and, again, no retina display.

So, I don't know. Can anyone offer some insight into why the System 76 system is so inexpensive compared to the base-model MBPR and the Latitude above?

I know that Dell sells, for instance, Inspirons, which are much cheaper than Latitudes, but my understanding is that these machines are essentially composed of whatever components can be bought most cheaply this week, and so they pose maintenance headaches, because it may be difficult to obtain a component that dies a year after purchase. Also, my personal experience with Inspirons is that they have very poor build quality.

I probably should have said that _I_ don't give a damn about mobile. I spend my whole day in front of a workstation, and maybe a few minutes a day using my cell phone. But still: Do you really think that Gnome and/or Canonical should be focussing on mobile?

You're right, I was being imprecise. I should have said Gnome and Canonical should stop obsessing about mobile and tablets. I guess I see more evidence of them obsessing about tablets and netbooks than about mobile. The thing that really bothers me is when I see the "workstation" experience get worse so that the tablet/netbook experience can be made better. I spend all day in front of a workstation, and maybe an hour a day with a tablet.

This article is strange: Some parts of it are sooo right, but then some parts are sooo wrong. Yes, the Linux world should stop obsessing about mobile and tablets, since they've basically already lost that battle. (And frankly: Who gives a damn about mobile? Some of us have work to do...) And yes, they should focus on their strengths in the desktop. But their strength is not web design and multimedia. As someone pointed out, they lost that domain to Apple a long time ago. Their strength is the scientific and technical desktop users. CERN uses Linux heavily. Many of the screenshots from the Curiousity landing showed a Linux desktop. I.e. people who need the computing equivalent of a truck, not a car. That's the core audience that desktop Linux should be trying to serve. And frankly, both Unity and the Gnome 3 Shell are steps in the wrong direction. Unity is clearly aimed at netbooks and tablets, and both Unity and Gnome Shell value simplicity over power, which is not what scientific and technical users want.

For my money, the recent moves Linux Mint has been making are the most promising ones happening in the Linux ecosystem right now: Don't fix what isn't broken, and make a distribution the just works out of the box. When the Gnome 3 goofballs eliminate yet another piece of useful functionality, do a fork. (And now they've started selling Linux Mint branded hardware, another smart move. One of the real problems with Linux these days is that you just can't buy hardware with Linux pre-installed that is equal in quality to Apple's hardware.)

Or at least that's my two cents.

That comment thread, esp. comment 148, seems to imply that Cinnamon will _not_ be part of Fedora 18. At least as I read it.

I meant a link saying that Cinnamon will be included in Fedora 18.

Could you provide a link like the one for MATE in Fedora?

Can anyone comment on what sort of software they use for collecting and analyzing this kind of data? Python+numpy? Matlab? Gnuplot? In a past life I was a neuroscientist, and although you could theoretically do experimental neuroscience entirely using open source tools, almost no one does in practice.

The current obsession with tablets is maddening. Tablets are great for many things, but I still spend much of my life sitting at a workstation: a computer with a keyboard, a mouse, and (lucky me) a big-ass monitor. So, for me, it's just sad that everyone is now rushing to optimize their OSes for tablets, often at the expense of usabilty in a workstation-like configuration.

Anyone who recommends Wine as a solution for running all your Windows applications loses a lot of credibility with me. In my experience, Wine just doesn't work all that well---certainly not well enough for doing real work. Obviously some applications work better than others, but every time I've tried Wine, at least one of the applications I use a lot has had serious problems. In my opinion, VirtualBox is a much, much better way to run Windows application on Linux.

I agree. TV/Movie money seems like a pretty good predictor of vote, but online/internet money much less so. But I'd still like to see an x-y plot with each congressperson a point, and TV/Movie money on one axis, online/internet money on the other, with each point colored by their vote. Then you could really see how separable the two populations are.

How much do these provisions of the NDAA really matter? They are still trumped by the Bill of Rights, which clearly forbids indefinite detention of citizens without trial. (The Sixth Amendment, in particular.) And the Bill of Rights can't be superceded except by a new amendment to the constitution. I still wish these provisions weren't there, because they seem insane to me, but I'm wondering if they're really of very much practical consequence.