This is a bit complicated.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is the government department that pays social security benefits in the UK. There are a range of benefits. Some of these benefits are for people who cannot work because of disability. In order to qualify for some of these disability benefits you need to have a medical assessment with an "independent" doctor. This doctor is independent from the patient. They're employed by companies who are paid by the DWP, so there's supposed to be some kind of arm's length arrangement there.

A doctor was employed by one of these companies to do this assessment work for the DWP. He was a committed Christian. He held that he would not be able to refer to people by anything other than the gender they were assigned at birth.

The DWP is clear: you must respect a person's choice of pronouns.

The General Medical Council (the registrant body for doctors in England) is also clear: you must not impose your personal views upon your patients, especially if it's going to cause distress.

This doctor was spoken to about his beliefs. He declined to change his stance. He lost his job. He took his employer to employment tribunal for unfair dismissal based on discrimination against his protected characteristic: his religious views.

He lost his case.

Here's the legal document: https://christianconcern.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/CC-Resource-Judgment-Mackereth-DWP-Others-ET-191002.pdf

It's pretty long! 42 pages! The last pages give a summary.

You'll notice the URL. He was supported by the Christian Legal Centre. I won't say anything about them, but I'll link this page which gives some useful information: https://nearlylegal.co.uk/2018/04/on-the-naughty-step-the-questionable-ethics-of-the-christian-legal-centre/

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.

Notes

We're coming up on #30! Exciting!

Previous topics

Previous topics are listed in the wiki.

This is obviously a thought-experiment, but maybe an interesting one. Let's say we get a super-efficient, eco-friendly alternative fuel that can do whatever rocket fuel does now with 1/100 of the cost, 1/100 of volume and 100% more efficiency. What does it change in the short term?

1. The Idea

Counting overall time would be awesome already. In order to avoid overloading the servers, you could just count every 5, 10 hours or something like that.

As a plus (I have no idea how hard this is, please forgive me), there could be graphs showing how much time you spent by day, week, month, year, etc.

This would be a good way to help Tilders prevent Tildes addiction (on the other hand, there would have to be some mechanic to prevent people from gamyfying this...).

This time count would be entirely private to each user by default, but there would the option to display it.

2. The Reason

I find that knowing how much time I spent on something helps me be more productive. It's the entire reason for the existence of tools such Rescue Time, Waka Time and Toggl. If I know how much I spend on a platform, it's easier to control my addiction to it. These other tools are heavy and focused on billing hours. That's not my use case. I know this might seem silly, but it makes a lot of difference for some people. 7.2% of the world's population has ADHD. I happen to be one of them.

In such a fashion that all my threads will open either collapsed and expanded. Ideally, there should be a setting for that. Some people might prefer to always open expanded regardless of their last choice.

Introduction

I wanna say that I made several corrections, additions, and improvements just because I love you guys way more than I love the people at Reddit

• Please note that I'm merely a dedicated Linux user, I'm speaking from that point of view. I'm not a developer and not a programmer. These are just my opinions of 10+ years using Linux

• These are just some commentaries from a dude who happen to love the concept of STABILITY in general (autism represent) and would like to discuss how it works when it comes to Linux distributions. This is all based on my use-cases and on what I think is common sense. I have no knowledge of how open-source projects really work, and make no claims regarding how they should work.

• Only distributions that claim to be stable are under my scope. So Arch and Debian Unstable are clearly out the scope, but Slackware, CentOS, Debian Buster, and MX-Linux are clearly under the scope.

• All considerations are void if the malfunctioning is SOLELY a product of hardware, extremely rare conditions or your own lack of knowledge.

• Except when otherwise noted, non-compliance means the distribution is deemed not stable.

1 Deal Breakers

After a correct installation by the user on hardware that is expressly supported by the developers, a stable distribution should, in the period of 1 year (counted from the first boot):

1. Remains bootable, manageable and fully accessible.
2. Work with almost no maintenance or intervention (updates excluded)
3. Present no decrease in performance
4. Freeze at most once every two weeks
5. Have no package issue that cannot be solved by a simple command from its own package manager

2 Major Issues

Because of the complex nature of major issues, I'm not going to establish any criteria about them. Both stable and unstable distributions have critical problems that cannot have a fixed time-frame.

3 Minor Issues/Bugs/Annoyances/etc

Small issues are the ones that do not impede the usage of the machine, but provoke significant annoyances:

Examples:

1. Window switching is not working properly
2. The mouse stops working for 3 seconds every 15 minutes
3. For some reason, the letter "c" is sending "h" on the terminal
4. My configurations are not saved after reboot
5. My configurations are not being saved at all
6. I must change video output manually every time I switch monitors
7. I must change audio output manually every time I switch monitors
8. Some essential configuration is ridiculously hard to find
9. Configurations have no undo button
10. Configurations have no reset button
11. A certain package cannot be installed
12. A certain dependence cannot be installed (dependency hell)
13. There's a ridiculously accessible keyboard shortcut that makes your keyboard change layouts all the fucking time

3.1 Places for Research

Such minor issues must be solved within 30 days, as long as the user does their part and seek some of the following resources:

1. Google
2. Official websites
3. Official forums
4. Official warnings, newsletters, etc
5. Semi-official communities
6. FAQs
7. Manuals
8. Github Issues
9. Gitlab Issues
10. Other Venues to post issues

If the minor issue is not solved in 45+ days, the distribution will be deemed not stable, regardless of the behavior of the user.

4. Conclusion

It is my opinion that, if any of the major and minor requirements are not fulfilled according to their particular rules, the distribution in question should not be deemed not Stable.

Let's mix things up a bit and talk about musicians and bands from our local areas. There's often some really great music happening in a local scene, which rarely sees the light of day. So hit us up with links to the music makers in your local scene (or your own band even!) so we can have a listen and maybe discover something new and amazing :)