I do not have any issues with my Nvidia+Intel setup, aside from some mishaps when I upgrade my Linux kernel (Bumblebee sometimes becomes a zombie kernel module, which won't unload, and that isn't fun).

There is Nouveau if you hate closed-source or something, but it has a lot of issues right now that should be resolved in the future: namely, that it doesn't support setting the clock rate of the GPU, so the GPU always runs at boot clock speeds by default. This means that your out-of-the-box performance with Nouveau could easily end up a tenth of that of the Nvidia blob.

There's ATI, but I've heard bad things about the stability of its driver. There seems to be a lot of activity on its driver development though, so that's good.

Do not go Intel. They have yet to release a 3.1 driver for Linux/Sandybridge (while Windows has had one available for quite some time). I do not know why they are claiming haswell will do 4.0 when their driver isn't even up to par with 3 year old specifications. I'm developing a game engine and am currently waiting on Intel to release a 3.1 driver. It's sad to see such a major player in GPUs to be so far behind on OpenGL. I doubt anyone would buy Intel if their GPUs only went up to, say, DirectX 8.0...

The ISS, as far as I can tell, already has access to the Internet. This is a new set of routing protocols designed to be more useful over intermittent and high-latency links such as those present in space.

The problem with uninventing nuclear bombs is that a decade later we'll have invented a whole new kind of weapon of mass destruction...

Meanwhile, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA (among many other companies which need life-critical applications) have been writing in C using the VXWorks Real Time Operating System for decades. Why? Well, definitely not because it's an "insecure bug-prone language". The bug-prone languages are the high level languages you probably are suggesting we use instead, which, instead of causing user error, have undefined behaviour, internal implementation bugs, and often many layers of godawful code. Good C is probably a heck of a lot more secure than any "Good PHP" you could hope to write, especially if you go by JPL's C coding conventions.

I say it should be replaced with a Steve Ballmer Borg logo.

The reason why we have precise measurements is because we have 30 satellites in extremely precise orbits that are carefully measured and corrected, which broadcast GPS signals all day long. There is really no practical way of getting a system like that in place now or in the foreseeable future on Mars.

Sudo effectively makes the user's password the superuser's password. This totally destroys the usefulness of having a separate root user altogether. Sudo was designed for RESTRICTING the privileges commands that needed some superuser permissions needed, not for turning regular accounts into root. This page makes no mention of your idea of how sudo is used: http://www.sudo.ws/sudo/intro.html

CrashCourse, the wonderful Youtube channel offering a history and biology course hosted by John and Hank Green!

I can see it being used on the tier 2 servers, as they're located at colleges around the world and not as time-critical like tier-0 servers.

Probably to appeal to C++ fanboys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf1fRu9YgfE Not my idea of a crap phone. Have you been living under a rock all this time ignoring the "I dropped my nokia phone on the sidewalk and it shattered. Sorry about your sidewalk." image macros spammed everywhere?

And the recording industry is still hungry for money.

If you plan on running that isn't OEM Windows or want it to last for more than a year, DO NOT GET AN ACER. I thought that, maybe, they used extremely shoddy parts and had bad ACPI support for only the cheap models. I was wrong. I've had this laptop for about a month and the fan is already dying on me... Next month it'll be the usb ports, like my sister's and cousin's laptops..

I forgot to mention, there are DEs which are fast "out of the box". I'm using the PCLinuxOS LXDE distribution right now.

I use LXDE because it reduces the bloat of a clunky window manager. You do not really have this option in windows, you only have explorer. That's it. If you want an older version? You're suggesting downgrading to an older, about to lose support, version of windows? What kind of suggestion is that? I don't have to downgrade to a distro from 2002 to get a speedy desktop, why should I have to do that with windows. In my experience, linux has always been much faster than windows (even with clunky ubuntu versus windows xp), more stable, and a friendlier environment for development. I still run windows, however, because running direct X 10/11 games in WINE is impossible if not near, and WINE is slow anyway (Ironically, blockland runs faster in wine than it does natively on windows...). And on my laptop, I have optimus graphics which are unsupported by nvidia for linux. So, I have to either play games on windows or suffer extremely slow integrated intel graphics.