Apparently, some scientist from UK and Finland.

Get your hands off of MY computer!

Please, by all means run a Cathedral OS on your own - it can even use the Linux kernel - I don't mind.

But quit insisting that I do so, too.

I run Gentoo, one of the less-used distributions. I chose it exactly because it was a geeky, nuts-and-bolts distribution. After all, at the time Linux was a hobby, and if you're in it for that kind of fun, go for it.

At the same time, I generally advise against using Gentoo. Unless you know why you want to use it, don't. New users should use something like Ubuntu, which I've installed for several people, or more recently Mint, which I've also done. We use RedHat at work because it's "Enterprise" and has a support contract, which bean-counters like.

But if Linux were a monoculture which kept me isolated from the nuts-and-bolts, I'd be running something else.

We will not solve the problem with illegal immigration until we figure out how to do something sane instead of the War on Drugs. Right now the unintended consequence of the War on Drugs is that south of the border, drug lords are about as well (if not better?) funded as the governments, destroying the local economies. Some of the people seeking jobs in those economies end up coming to the US in search of work.

Seconded. When the power and everything else is out, I call to report it on my land line.

Maybe there's another reason that our infrastructure is crumbling...

(Line up the conspiracy theories.)

Now we need the quasi-obligatory response that this is really a government problem, and if government weren't in there mucking about with needless regulation the free market would address the problem and we'd all be in broadband utopia at reasonable prices.

Nothing shy of a nearby gamma burst or the eventual day when the sun goes red-giant is likely to end all life on Earth.

But there are a lot of things shy of that that can make life really uncomfortable for us, perhaps terminally so. It's happened 5 times before, to longer-lived species than us.

Don't forget that your insurance company would really like to get their spy dongle onto your ODB II port, too. So this HUD is really the third usage for the ODB II port, the first of course being the diagnostics that it was designed for. How soon before we have ODB-splitters?

I'm sure your insurance company would like their spy dongle to be the only thing plugged into your ODB II port while driving, especially if the only other available driving-time plugin was a HUD/distraction. But what if other more sensible plugins became available, even safety improving ones, say a breathalyzer lockout...

As long as the guesture input subsystem isn't connected to the in-car weapons subsystem.

I certainly believe that there are new things under the sun. I just don't believe that there are as many of them as our trendsetting media would like us to think. Come to think of it, I'll bet that the truly new things under the sun are seldom well covered. I guess Sturgeon's Law applies.

Or the paraphrase, "History repeats itself because nobody listened the first time." (In practice, the singular "first time" is insufficient.)