...so they consider "embracing" the movement from within, with the potential to further fragment it by only supporting some distributions and by making their stuff hard to use on the distros that they can't influence, then they eventually discontinue support for that distro while showcasing their commercial product that does something not entirely unlike what was done through that distro before.

I'm sorry, how is sending humans to Venus, already a long flight, to experience conditions significantly different than those on Mars, going to help us more than say, sending a crew up to ISS for eight months, then transferring them to a craft to send them to the moon, to have them live on the moon for a few days or weeks, to then send them back to the station for eight months, to then send them back to earth?

We could send a rescue mission straight from Earth to the moon a hell of a lot faster than we could send one to Venus, and we already have experience with landing on and taking off from the moon, so developing craft to do that mission would be much easier, and could be part of a greater set of missions to the moon in general.

If we really want to test sending humans outside of the region of space protected by Earth's magnetic field, how about sending astronauts in a solar orbit, to end up at the moon? If we have existing lunar missions, we could even have a short-flight team waiting for them when they arrive, to study their physiology from the long duration flight and recovery in a lower-gravity environment, without those doing the study necessarily being subject to it themselves.

Experience has taught me that capability and knowledge takes a back-seat to being liked by the people making the personnel decisions. Drinking buddies, flirts, camping cliques, fellow sports fans, all move up faster than those that have the best technical knowledge.

Okay, a fundamental question then... What's the mission?

I don't see a mission for humans hovering over Venus. This isn't like a possible geology excavation on Mars where it might actually be easier if humans are on-site to direct or operate machines for specific applications.

I believe that humans should go explore space, but I also believe that with only finite resources and commitment to doing it, the effort should be focused on places where humans can actually be boots-on-the-ground to rove, to explore.

Honestly I don't think that this is viable, mainly because the airship is a pretty damn big single point of failure without an option to fail-safe, and if astronauts can't roam the surface of the planet then there's not a lot of benefit to sending humans as they'll effectively be cooped up inside of the craft the same as if they're traversing open space.

This isn't Empire Strikes Back, some glorious cloud-city.

Uh, you know that students are together for perhaps six hours a day, and that differing class schedules means that the students don't remain as a cohesive group for more than an hour at a time, right?

It isn't like we're putting them in barracks together.

Chrysler's minivans have been purpose-designed from the wheels-up, even when they shared drivetrain engineering with the K-cars. Having worked on, restored, and junked-out cars, I can state, definitively, that Chrysler's minivans share very little, outside of the drivetrain, with any of their other vehicles.

The Town and Country we last rented got around 27 miles per gallon. It handled just fine.

CUVs are often based on the mid or full-sized sedan from the company, with a mostly-same floor pan with height extended suspension to boost it up a bit.

A lot of the boys that become interested in computers also have problems relating to other people, epecially to girls their own ages. Given that they probably also don't have 'the right stuff' from the perspectives of a lot of the girls around them, they might become slightly embittered towards girls due to a lack of relationship success with them, and when these boys are grouped together, as it is cheaper to educate several students at once, the environment is generally hostile towards girls, so those girls that are actually intersted in computers are driven away both by their notions of the boys and by the boys own actions.

Unless you can find a way to break this cycle, I don't see anything else working as much more than a band-aid to the problem.

I'm actually in favor of gender-segregated junior high. Give the kids a chance to learn how to deal with their new hormones when there's not really much option to showboat for the other gender.

Plus the driver from the sedan service probably has a lot more experience and is paid to be professional, the car is well-maintained, and the company has proper commercial insurance. The fat guy in the prius may as well be, "ass, gas, or grass, no one rides for free."

I've got a family member in a similar state, he worked until he was 70 years old in a labor job and retired only because it was mandated. He works on something physical almost every day even though he's in his late eighties. His skin while not as bad as some, still clearly has deteriorated with age.

I like it when solutions are both simple and correct.

After lengthy analysis of the work and further experimental confirmation we may have a Nobel winner on our hands.

That's a load of crap. If a CNC is too old, it's very likely that the CNC-specific software will have problems running on newer distributions because the libraries don't behave the way the old application needs anymore. Dependencies will fail and the program will crash, or even if the application's source is available it will fail to compile and be a huge pain in the ass to fix, if it's possible for the average user of a CNC mill at all.

It's also likely that it won't be updated, and if on the network will pose a security vulnerability.

Well, apparently the new Cuban government did accept payment a few times on the base, which the US interprets as having been recognized by the Castro government as legitimately agreeing with the treaty that established the base in the first place.

That's unfortunately not the exception.

I have an OTDR from EXFO that's effectively a Windows 2000 machine with some special controllers, drivers, and software. Most of the CNC machines that I've supported run Windows 95 or 98, and it's becoming a problem, getting project files on to them to have machined.

It's a lot easier when one doesn't have the write the OS, but unfortunately using a general-purpose OS means that the equipment becomes unsupportable before the job the machine was purchased to do is no longer necessary and before everything wears out.

Go back and look at the license plate on the car that Jon Pertwee's car had, and at the heavy-handed use of the question mark in both the Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy eras, and tell yourself that "Doctor Who" for the character was not ever normal.