We're witnessing the aftermath. I moved to mint a long time ago to get away from their silly 'one interface to rule them all' mentality. For a while they had a chance to recover from that, no longer. I think it's too late to recover what they lost when they went down that path.

I myself have several table legs that are slightly shorter than the other three.

Those web servers can efficiently be hosted on thousands of linux servers hosted on a single mainframe, which is simultaneously running that CICS infrastructure. That's exactly the setup where I work.

It's not 'essential', but it's very, very good at what it does, and depending on scale it does it very cost efficiently.

I'm sitting right now in a year long training program my employer created to get people to shift from distributed IT to the mainframe world. At the moment I'm hoping to go into z/VM and linux, but at the end of the course I'll have my choice of several technologies to go into. The folks who know this tech are retiring fast - it's an excellent place to go for lots of free training and advancement.

I was never of the opinion that mainframes were 'old' or 'going away', but I've been amazed to see how far in front of the distributed world the mainframe is, and how many things I thought were relatively new that were actually done decades ago on the mainframe - virtualization technology in particular, but also just IO in general - nothing in the distributed world even comes close.

I'm using VLC on Windows 7 right now - because I'm at work. I use it at home on linux and mac boxes.

I prefer it to any other media player I've seen on windows. I'm not a fan of windows 8 by any means, but it's obvious why someone would want it there.

Maybe you didn't hear - he took a gun safety class? He's totally an expert. Seriously - that's like someone on slashdot claiming they know what the article says because they read the summary. Oh, wait . . . carry on!

" if its US Government then they have to follow most of their own laws . . ."

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

AHEM. Ok I'm better now. Carry on.

That's mostly bullshit. Especially in the case of someone able to do the job she's doing, there are lots of options.

True they may not pay as well at first, or be as fun, etc, but she's got plenty of options. So do the vast majority of people - but the shitty job you know is a lot more comfortable than the great job you never applied for, so most people never find out.

A lot of the great jobs involve working your way up - being willing to take a crappy job with an eye for what it could mean in 5 or 10 years is something they don't teach in school, and especially not in college - it's almost comical to see fresh college graduates going out into the world applying for jobs they barely qualify to clean up after. A part time job cleaning out horse stalls now might get you a full time job training them later in your life, but like everyone you have to wade through some shit first.

Whether evolution is 'natural' or 'supernatural' has no effect on the evolution itself, or the scientific principles being observed. He doesn't need to support his belief with evidence - it's an opinion about something no one can prove or disprove. Claiming to know the answer to that for sure is silly - so is claiming one is more likely than another. The question itself is a logical fallacy - there is no answer, so there is no need to be a dick about what someone believes. It's how they approach the rest of their lives, and the science around them that's important.

"I believe that all measurable and observable phenomena in the universe were created." isn't any different that believing that they were a product of random chance in that no one can ever prove one or the other to be the more accurate position.

If only there were some explanation for things being written with an intended meaning different than the literal meaning.

Metaphorically speaking, that's a tough nut to crack. Oh well.

Midichlorians? Not sure what that is. Midichlorians do not exist in this or any fictional universe.

"it's nowhere close to the water level found on Earth and therefore it's ability to support any form of life is quite low"

Conjecture much?

In the last few months I've done several linux installas and several windows 7 installs. I've seen all kinds of weird issues with the windows 8 boxes, and I haven't had an Ubuntu installation issue in . . . well, ever. Unity is stupid and now I can't recommend Ubuntu because of it, but mostly I can't recommend it because everyone seems to love rebooting and dealing with all kinds of malware. Linux isn't any harder than anything else any more, it's just that everyone already knows how to solve billion problems windows generates on a daily basis, and is content to have their system lock up or run super slow periodically - they think it's just the way things work. As long as games aren't an issue, linux would be better for almost everyone. As long as people are obstinate about it, it won't matter anyway. Linux's main problem is marketing now - technically (especially for casual home use) it's been at least as good as it's competitors for a long time.

Or teen pregnant?

Not living in American is actually punishable under American law. Better watch out.