Err, the batteries or super capacitors are probably charged up before each shot then discharge during it, so most of the time they'll do very little if you hit them with a shell.

However successive UK governments have seen "improving" the navy as meaning strip it of as many ships as it can. Soon it'll consist of 2 men and a rowing boat. Oh, and one overpriced aircraft carrier with no planes that can fly from it.

POssibly the moon is formed from 2 bodies colliding and before it could completely settle down into a round shape it froze with that ridge remaining?

Seriously, that guy has been shouting at the pigeons for years. And I speak as an open source user and advocate.

How typical of slashdot - pick and choose responses to suit your own point and dismiss the ones you don't agree with. You've got to laugh :o)

"the 7th fleet is a different story."

I'm not *entirely* sure how much use that would be on the moon.

3-4 naysayers? More like the majority of the linux community. As for a new init process, sure , there's room for *improvement*. Systemd is not an improvement - its a bug ridden overly complex dogs dinner that is one mans ego trip being ridden roughshod through the whole linux/unix principal of KISS and do one thing well. Now you might not give a stuff about that principal but most of us do and we do not want to see this POS being installed by default.

"You don't install a system and watch how stable it is, but how useful it is"

A system that goes down halfway through updating a million rows of customer data is not terribly useful. The whole point about *nix is its stability. You can leave the Oooh Shiny Features and piss poor stability to Microsoft, they've got that covered.

Try driving in some european cities with windy narrow streets where cars have to pull in to let others pass and drivers cutting each other up left, right and centre. Good luck to a google car managing that. And even they are easy compared to some asian cities where the vehicles can hardly move due to obstructions and people.

"That's going to be huge in the future."

Maybe, maybe not. It depends how many people are willing to travel in an automated vehicle if there is an alternative one with a human driver. Plus costs will play a part too - they may be no option if automated cabs can seriously undercut human driven cabs and eventually the latter go out of business.

" I'd predict that eventually everyone will have a subscription to an automatic transportation service."

Err, why? You can be a subscriber to normal taxi services now in many countries. How many people bother? I think you underestimate the desirability of the private car to a large proportion of the population of the planet. And if you think thats just a western viewpoint take a look at whats happened in china in the last 20 years with the exponential increase in private car ownership.

If you don't believe me remove one of the legs of your chair and see how long you can remain upright while sitting on it. Now you sprawled on the floor is also a stable equlibria but I doubt its where you want to be - and similarly a fucked up ecosystem that is "stable" with a highly reduced number of species isn't necessaily a good place to be be for this planets enviroment or frankly us.

If I go back in time and kill the old version of myself - is that suicide or murder?

They did go for C++. On Linux. It was more than just issues with .NET.

Would this be the "hobby" OS that took over running the London Stock Exchange trading platform when Windows couldn't cope?

... there has to be a trojan on the system or at least something connected to the X server over the network.

Hmm. I think by this time your security is already out the window and a borked lock program is the least of your worries.