Instead, they should use one of the old oil rigs that are out there. Clean it up, land it on the rig, and then offload with a crane to a barge and take it back for launc.

That is actually rather brilliant. Even if they had to invest in modifying a rig or building their own platform, it eliminates the potential hazard to humans. Maybe if they could demonstrate successfully landing a dozen or so, then they could land them at a spaceport.

Bug bounties don't always involve bugs. A lot of times it is paying someone to back port software. For example software x version 1.5 is available for and popular on... lets say an Ubuntu 12.04 based system. Version 2.0 comes out with a host of cool new features, except that it is only available for Ubuntu 13.10 based systems and the maintainers are not going to port it to 12.04. So, within the same frame work of a bug bounty, community members pool money and pay someone $300 to back port the software. I see this sort of thing happen all the time and have personally benefited from it. I also see distro maintainers offer bounties to fix bugs for their own projects or bounties to back port features of their latest system to their previous version. Or is he only talking closed source style bounties? Overall the article is hard to follow logically and seems to have a very narrow view of the world of software in general and I admittedly did not finish it because of that.

Also, this should be modded up.

As much as I appreciate your advice, I do not run Windows. I'm all Linux and FreeBSD. However, I will file this away in my notes if I ever need to set it up for someone else. Thanks.

I have a 120 gig Sandisk Extreme 2 SSD and as a performance upgrade, you really can't do better than an SSD, assuming a minimum of 4 GB of ram. I was a little skeptical of claims when I bought it, but I can vouch that people aren't messing around when they talk about instant boot and zero-second loads times for applications. Mileage may vary depending on the brand and model, research and watch the specs closely. A paltry 120 gigs by itself is not enough for me or most people these days so I balance things out by installing the OS and applications on the SSD, while most files go onto a hard drive. This means a slight change in workflow, but it is entirely worth it.

So they are retiring robots to have humans do their jobs in order to one day build better robots with human modeled efficiency to replace the humans?

No worries. The G in Gimp stand for GNU not Gnome. The Gimp predates Gnome by quite a lot. The only tie that binds them is that Gimp donations are handled by the Gnome foundation, which is easily changed. Read this page here:

Donating to The Gimp

It's all in the transfer of kinetic energy from the projectile into the target. It's like being in a car accident at 5,000 MPH.

Clearly you weren't here in those dark days before moderation. Natalie Portman, hot grits, goatse links, etc, etc, etc... Don't like what you see in the comments? Get an account, stop whining as an AC, earn some mod points, and help eradicate the less flattering posts. I do.

because their main expense is bandwidth.

And they get to offset that cost by running a more efficient operation thanks to higher density disks. Ultimately that also means less hard drives than if they were all using 6.4 GB driver, and less staff to chase them down when they flake out. Not to mention what they save on their power bill. Also, sometime in the last year cloud storage and services stopped being a buzzword and entered reality.

I trust Amazon comments on matters like these:

http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-H...

Simple. If we and the Universe were as overwhelmingly made of anti-matter as it is instead matter, we would call anti-matter matter and matter anti-matter. It's just semantics. You reading into it way too much.

While the internet did not make me an atheist, it did made me a better informed atheist with better arguments. It also showed me that I was far from alone.

If he would have just waited a few weeks the whole thing would have just blown over. Even the ten people boycotting Firefox would have forgotten. He must have been under some internal pressure.

Pardon this post as it is heavy on opinion. If you think it's so far off the mark you want to mod me down, it would be far more productive to reply.

Ubuntu One was a pretty big deal and one of the last good things attached to Canonical Ubuntu's name (IMHO). Hard times at Canonical perhaps? Canonical has always struck me as a company that won't be around forever, if even a few scant more years. They are always either too busy chasing unrealistic goals in the hopes of being elevated to the levels of the real major players in tech, or are busy fighting against popular trends and pushing back against the overall direction of Linux and Open Source.

The death of Canonical is a shake up the Linux development community needs for both perspective and spurring continued innovation in Linux and Linux distributions.