After a few rounds by Microsoft lobbyists, the required language switches from Python to Visual Basic

yet it's just now climbing out of a third world status that it's been in for centuries.

But just barely for 2 centuries. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, Chinese technology and culture was way ahead of Europe. This is why there still is mystique about Eastern wisdom. Civilizations rise and fall, then rise again, it is not a linear progression upwards.

"the reaction mass is pre-ionized"

I wonder how they manage that? Isn't it equivalent to carrying a very large electric charge and somehow keeping it from getting neutralized? Same problem as in large capacitors. If they have tech to do that, wouldn't it be a wonderful electricity storage system!

The way things are going, all significant airports will be requiring scanning a few years from now. They are arguing about it at the EU level right now, with some politicians still voicing privacy concerns, but I expect they will be overridden, especially if yet another terrorist incident occurs on some flight. So either you submit to scanning, or don't fly.

Wonder if this, combined with rising fuel costs and carbon footprint concerns, will result in a world where civilian passenger flights are an expensive rarity. Would transatlantic passenger ships come back?

Thanks. That's a relief. Makes the new Intel CPU a reasonable prospect when I next need to update my home box (now with Pentium Duo + ATI 9200). I'm not a big user of 3D apps, but I like to fly with the Google Earth occasionally, and the kid needs some games...

Is the graphics unit a derivative of the notorious Poulsbo (no good open-source Linux support), or of GMA9xx (open drivers on Linux)?

"For example, Finland. Just over 5 million people in that very large country, but 25% of them live in Helsinki urban area.

True, but the coverage in the rest of the country (where I happen to live) is still very good. You will have to go far into unpopulated woods to lose the signal entirely, although more advanced technologies like EDGE or 3G drop out soon outside cities or major roads. The upcoming 3G over the 900 Mhz band should help solve some of this problem.

In the countryside, the telcos are actually more or less forcing people to cellular by dropping maintenance of fixed wire lines, which is much more expensive in sparsely populated areas than maintaining a few more base stations. Many hate this because then they cannot get ADSL lines and have to rely on slower wireless data.

Well, it works for me well in Mandriva, and apparently also for lots of other people, otherwise XFS would have surely disappeared from the kernel by now. I have not encountered data loss with it so far. I wonder how long ago did you have your bad experiences? I have heard XFS was really flaky in the beginning, which may have earned it a lasting bad reputation, even if it has mended its ways.

Granted, the usage on my XFS computer is not so heavy, but the power cord occasinally gets yanked by a 3-year-old, exercising the journaling features.

As to why, I find it has a noticeably better performance than ext3 for my uses. Ext3 for example somehow manages to spend ages in deleting a large directory tree.

Mandriva is very easy to use, but also has all the power user features you can wish for easily available: by default there is a root account you can login to directly, unlike in Ubuntu. Installer supports more file system choices than most other distros (been running XFS at home for a long time).

Hardware support is good. My gut feeling has been it is better than in Ubuntu, but this is just personal experiences with some boxes that ran Mandriva but not Ubuntu, several years ago, and may not apply to latest versions of both.

Software versions in Mandriva are usually very fresh. It also seems to have better good 32 and 64 bit interoperability than most. I have been running the 64-bit version, yet I have not seen the 32-bit Flash troubles that users of other distros report. Just install the plugins and tell nspluginwrapper to update its information. I guess the fact that the author of nspluginwrapper used to work for Mandriva shows!

One good thing in favor of Mandriva is the PLF ("Penguin Liberation Front") repository that you can use to easily add software that the patent-encumbered in some parts of the world.

whether there is prior art in the way IBM mainframes handle I/O

Hmm, noticed that IBM is not in the list of defendants. The patent trolls don't want to wake up the IBM legal Nazgul, after what happened to SCO...

Any kind of airship is slow and large, providing an easy target for the bad guys. Even the common shoulder-fired Stinger missile reaches up to 15 700 feet (says Wikipedia), so the ship would be vulnerable to it for a long time during its ascent and descent. Other rockets (maybe improvised) could reach it at the cruising altitude.