18 is a higher number than 11! It must be superior!

Maybe, but where is the upside of all that nonsense? Why should we even accept a non-massive downgrade? It't software - it's OPEN SOURCE software, it should be controlled by the users.

But it isn't. It is controlled by the distributors, who are driven by peer-pressure to always use the latest version of everything.

What about stability and performance?

Any improvements there?

KDE 4 never reached the level of reliability and performance of KDE 3.

having to do relearning to do something you did for years - only slower is a massive downgrade.

Unfortunately fully true.

I still miss KDE 3, it was stable, it was reliable and it was practically bug-free. KDE 4 never reached it in these regards even after many years of development.

KDE is like the one-eyed among the blind.

I truely hope that KDE 5 will be better than KDE 4, but I have my doubts.

Climatology uses the same technique as astrology:

The consensus.

You do realize that that HUGE advantage is at the same time a HUGE disadvantage for the consumer?

I would never use an iPhone, simply because it is a one-vendor platform and I will not allow that one vendor to take a HUGE advantage out of me.

I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

"Android is fragmenting and quite possibly will self-destruct."

Android is currently in the process of gobbling up more and more market-share, it is basically the only game in town on low-end phones, has already overtaken iOS on high-end phones and is currently on it's way to eclipse iOS on tablets. I personally still run a very old Android 2.x Galaxy Note 1 phone and I like it that I still can run most applications (although I am a bit grumpy at Google for disallowing Chrome on Android 2.x - but there are numerous alternatives). So "fragmentation" is a big, big plus for me, because when I buy an expensive phone I expect to use it for at least 5 years. Android has excellent backwards-compatibility libraries which means that normally you can get an app written for Android 4 to run just fine on Android 2.

"Fragmentation" was also a big plus for the PC in the 90s. Yes, it can be a headache sometimes, but in the end it's a great advantage (and not a disadvantage) to be able to choose among several vendors and to not be at the mercy of one. All the one-vendor platforms (Commodore, Apple, the Unixes, etc.) died or got pushed into a niche.

The same was true for VCRs (The "Betamax" platform was stared as a Sony-only project while VHS was a multi-vendor platform right from the start), the same was seen for memory cards (the "Memory-stick" was a another Sony-pet project which lost against SD-cards), etc.

So in the end, put your money on the "fragmented" platform - it will win. Every. Single. Time.

And let's not forget that the important Microsoft patents all run out before 2020 which will remove a big burden from the Android platform.

Here a quote from Wikipedia about VHS/Betamax:

JVC believed that an open standard, with the format shared among competitors without licensing the technology, was better for the consumer. To prevent the MITI from adopting Betamax, JVC worked to convince other companies, in particular Matsushita (Japan's largest electronics manufacturer at the time, marketing its products under the National brand in most territories and the Panasonic brand in North America, and JVC's majority stockholder), to accept VHS, and thereby work against Sony and the MITI.[12] Matsushita agreed, primarily out of concern that Sony might become the leader in the field if its proprietary Betamax format was the only one allowed to be manufactured.

The same arguments can be said against Windows phone and iOS. While iOS will stay on with a slowly shrinking share for a very long time (simply because they have so many apps), Windows phone is stillborn and will never even reach the share of their earlier windows phone platforms that they had in the early 2000s.

So when I invite Win10-users I have to debug and reconfigure their devices on the doorstep? Are you serious?

The point is that with Windows 10 this will happen automatically without them knowing it.

So when I invite a Win10 user and give him/her the password, that password may be shared to anybody that Win10 user is connected to - without that Win10 user knowing or realizing it.

And of course a lot of people use the same password for their WIFI as for other stuff, so Win10 seems to be a quite nice password sniffer.

That is the problem. People screaming passwords from mountaintops isn't.

Well, Western medicine is geared towards medicine that is mass-produced and is the same for everybody.

Anything that does not fit the pattern is essentially forbidden, for example:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Phage therapy is an alternative to antibiotics, has no side effects and is dirt-cheap. (Literally: Phages can be grown by using local sewage-water, because that water contains exactly those bacteria you want to fight) The problem is that they only work for a very specific strain of bacteria, therefore the phages have to be grown to match the patient's infection and some phages may work only for a few dozen patients. - Far too few to justify making the huge testing necessary for medication.

So phages are de-facto illegal, even though they are risk-free and there is a huge problem with antibiotics and they are the only chance against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

To be fair, this overregulation was imported from the East (think Byzantine Empire, Chinese Empire, etc.) and is not really a Western idea. Nevertheless it is today a feature of Western medicine.

Half of Ukraine would freeze to death without Russian gas in the winter. You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Poroshenko also once held up Russian civilian passports from supposedly dead Russian soldiers in a press conference - obviously not knowing that Russian soldiers have military (that means different) passports.

He seems to be one of those people who cannot distinguish a plausible lie from a wild fary-tale.

There never was a cold "war". Right from the 1940's to 1991 the USSR sold oil and gas to the West in exchange of much needed machinery and technicians. It may have been a cold peace, but it's not a war when enemies are trading with each other.

So the USA helping organ-trading Albanians to secede from a democratic government is just fine, but Russia helping Russian-speakers to secede from a coup-d'etat government is evil? How so?