America's been the brunt of an epic April Fools prank for the last 15 years or so.. A prank that is not the least bit funny..And its gotten a LOT worse in the last five years.. I, for one, am NOT laughing nor pleased....

Kinda sounds like one *I* would play in....

You think Debian, circa 2002-2003 was bad? you shoulda tried Slackware back around 1995 or so.. Umptysquat floppy disks, handediting ALL the config files for EVERYTHING.. Since most of the time I was building a server to run ftpd or httpd, I didn't bother messing with XFree86 and its mindnumbing configuration... Today's Linux is da BOMB!!

Instead, we have what has now become the defacto US Department of Propaganda.. Herman Goebbles, Hitler's propaganda minister, would have had an orgasm over the kind of power today's propaganda apparatus has...

Geez.. I wish I hadn't already posted.. I'd mod you UP UP UP.. I STRONGLY agree with your eloquent statement on "consequences"... Snowden has sacrificed his normal life, where he will likely be permanently exiled to whatEVER country feels the cojones to stand up to what has become the American war-machine... hint: VERY few countries have these cojones... Russia being one of the very few.. If he'd stayed in the US, he'd more than likely be dead now... As much as I love America, having served in the Army in the 70s, I'm terrified of its government, which has become totally evil in the last 20 years or so..

Yes, Snowden broke the "law", a "law" that ANYone with half a brain could see violated the Constitution, DESPITE what the paid-off Congress and Judiciary say.. He stood up for the Constitution, and is a hero in my book, like many of the heroes from the first American Revolution.. I say "first revolution" because I'm damn sure we're well into the 2nd Revolution... I fear this one is gonna be MUCH bloodier than the first...

Always knew there was something about the Woz I really admired...

I do a multi-level backup.. I have about 110GB of stuff thats nice to have, but if the house burned down and took the machine the data was on, the house server, AND the USB NAS drive that 110GB is backed up on, I'd not lose too much sleep, THEN I have a smaller subset of data, about 10GB that I would cry my eyes out if it were lost. You can imagine the data is.. Tax returns, pictures, scanned documents, etc.. That subset is backed up to the NAS and house server along with the 110GB of stuff, PLUS its backed up to AWS S3. I really couldn't see wasting $$ to backup the whole 120GB...

Judging from the increasing number of brain-dead liberals infesting America, I think you're gonna be waiting a LONG LONG time......

Everybody seems to have forgotten that there are two additional space stations currently in orbit besides ISS.. They're the Bigelow Aerospace Genesis I/II habitats, that were launched WAY back in 2006/2007. http://www.bigelowaerospace.co... Bigelow is right here in North Las Vegas, and those habitats are still there and certainly could be commercial staging locations for Mars missions, with SpaceX getting everything into orbit. The ISS is great and all, but its encombered by too many governments.. To use ISS for staging an essentially commericial mission to Mars would be a lesson in futility.. If Musk/SpaceX got together with Bob Bigelow, at Bigelow Aerospace, great things might happen....

With the current government (and the last couple also) the "rule of law" is dead.. not just on life support, but dead and begining to smell....

I'm the defacto tech support for my church/neighborhood. I've installed Ubuntu on quite a few of these users, especially ones whose older machine was running XP, and they did not have the recovery disks to restore from, and the machine was crufted with malware such that it would take more time than it was worth to clean the system. In the first case, I gave them a 3-way ultimatum, spend $75/hr for at least 3-4 hours for me to clean the system, OR I would backup their docs, nuke XP from orbit, install Ubuntu, and life goes on OR they buy a new system with Win7/8 on it.. After seeing a LiveCD demo of Ubuntu, and my explaining to them that they would not be plagued with the endless malware and its slow down of the machine on Linux, they smartly opted for the "nuke/pave" option. Since then, word of mouth has spread and I've done quite a few more systems in the neighborhood. Quite a few of these were essentially unneeded upgrades, in that the user was not seeing any real slowness on the system due to malware, they just wanted their machine to perform better than it was under XP. These original "upgrades" were done using Ubuntu 10.04LTS as they were done in the 2010-2011 timeframe. Since the turd that is Unity/Ubuntu 12.04 (and above) I've switched to Debian Mint for these upgrades, as the "focus group" I tried on Ubuntu 12.04LTS with Unity were unanamous with their scorn for Unity. What with XP patches/"support" coming to stop in April, I figure with a little local advertisement on the imminent un-support for XP, I'll get a nice uptick in business doing these upgrades.. Mayhaps even enough work to hire some help...

I try not to reply to ACs, but I stand behind the "grandma will stop calling with all those support questions"... I've upgraded several former XP users to XUbuntu, and while I used to get calls from them all the time while they were on XP, now I get blissful silence.. I also get comments from them like "This machine is soo much faster now..", *this* machine being an HP laptop circa 2005..

I'm capitalizing on the fact that XP is going un-supported in April.. I've started a business here installing Mint Linux to replace XP. I'd started slowly a while back, simply catching people with malware-crufted XP installs, and who only did simple tasks on Windows. The first couple were "forced" *upgrades* since the owner of the machine did not have any recovery disks, and there was so much malware that it would have taken many hours to clean. I showed them a LIveCD of Ubuntu, and gave em a ultimatum.. Linux or a new system, since the old system was not a candidate for Win7/8. They grudgingly accepted, and since then, when I see the client, she's happy, with no more slowness due to crap on the system. In fact, the new few "upgrades" were by word-of-mouth from this original user. I'm gonna put out flyers explaining whats gonna happen in April and I and my partners stand ready to give their machines new life withOUT the risk of Microsoft products...

Sorry, sparky.. if you don't want to read "hit pieces on Microsoft", you can very easily skip them..
As for me, I'm fed up with the "crack smoking monkeys" from Redmond, and I enjoy reading about
them getting bashed..