There were at least third party tools, like GSynaptics that worked. Of course nobody cares about backward compatibility, so that doesn't work anymore. GSynaptics was continued into GPointingDeviceSettings, which was quite powerful. I am not sure whether it was part of the official gnome-project. But then again, it is not available for Gnome 3. Of course neither the Gnome-folks nor the distribution makers actually care about those things. After all, who needs a working touchpad, if instead I can get the _latest_ version of Gnome, right?

> what they do when they come home after work???? if you come home from work at 11pm, maybe you just want to sleep? Japanese folks are required to do long hours a lot, not matter if the overtime actually makes sense or not.

Number one. In fact, Deutsche Telekom has an incredible huge debt they want to get rid off.

definitely not. At that time, ppl were really waiting for a usable and affordable Unix system for x86. BSD was sort of blocked due to the legal battle, commercial Unices were not affordable, and the development model of minix didn't allow it to become a "real" OS, it was just a tool for teaching. GNU at that time had an excellent track record - maybe not timewise, but then again, they were producing real results (all the gnu commandline tools, the gnu c compiler, emacs etc.). Back then, it really seemed that it was just a matter of time until we all would see a full GNU system... well... history told another story...

this "airlifting some generators" has been mentioned again and again. But it is quite questionable whether a suitable replacement for the diesl generators could have been airlifted at all. I mean these things are _huge_ and generate _massive_ amounts of power.

What is however questionable is that the emergency circualtion system failed so fast, the one that is mainly powered by steam generated from the reactor, and basically circulates water (steam) from the reactor pressure vessel to the torus, where it cools down, and is then pumped into the rpv again. Of course this can not go indefinitely, but this stopped way too fast imho. Especially since there is only a small amount of energy for some electric controls, as most of the system is powered by the steam from the rpv.

In any event, there are _a lot_ of questions concerning how this accident happened, and so far this has not been explained at all neither by Tepco or the Japanese government, despite promises to finally give out more information.

I agree that this is a really nice from Microsoft, but why not go for the "original", i.e. Ocaml?

hm. Does the kanji for "turtle" really come up so often? Whenever I saw the name (kame), it was usually written katakana anyway... I really wonder how many of these added kanji are of _real_ importance...

all theoretical free-market models make certain assumption: 1) The participants act rationally and 2) the cost of information is free.
If you take out these assumptions than the free-market model is theoretical on a weak basis, and, scientifically, not "better" or "worse" than fascism or communism or whatever.

Think of this: If you have two types of orange juice, one is cheaper and high on dioxins due to improper processing of the manufacturer and one is more expensive. Otherwise they are mostly the same. Is it rationally to buy the poisend one?

try to estimate cost vs. life expectancy in a function and derive the local maximum.

After all, when it comes to health we should never forget what a life is worth... in terms of hard currency.

As someone who is currently doing academic programming in Ocaml, I can only agree and stress the significance of adding F#. Microsoft is actively pushing functional programming into the industry.
Sure, I don't expect that it will reach the popularity of C# of VB.net, but coming from Ocaml, it's just fantastic:

- finally a proper IDE with code completion and just... a _real_ IDE (sorry, but emacs + tuareg-mode is no comparison)

- finally a usable debugger. The gdb-like thing deployed with ocaml is just a joke

- proper documentation. I really have to credit Microsoft here for providing excellent documentation, even encouraging or paying capable authors to write a book

And that's why it will never be the year of Linux on the desktop. Because for that, commercial applications need to be there, and with this attitude, there will never be widespread commercial applications on Linux.

but if they didn't survive my security measures, they can't sue...

So, if all his points are invalid, then why is marketshare for Linux on the desktop so insignificant?
"Microsoft is the evil" unfortunately dosn't work, as marketshare for Apple has risen in recent years - despite the fact that their software/hardware is mostly closed-source/proprietary and also not cheap.
All marketing? I don't think so. Despite what the slashdot crowds say, poor aceptance of users is not due to "don't know", it's because users are actively avoiding it.
After the horrible Vista-PR it was really a chance for Linux, this chance is gone. And why? Because if you really take a look, hands down:

- The same problems 10 years ago still plague Linux today
- A Windows 98-desktop allows for more productivity than a todays linux-desktop. (Think of CAD,2D,3D,Office,Audio/Videoproduction, Hardware compatibility) etc. etc.

So it works for you. Great.

Thing is, if it in fact would work so great for everyone, then why is Linux-on-the-desktop marketshare almost neglectible?

and btw., to pick just one thing out of many: "Enterprise: no standard way of software distribution".
I think the notion is here more like centralized software/lifecylcle management, i.e. something in the direction of Novell Zenworks. There is some work in that direction, mostly from Novell and RedHat which is no wonder as their man focus is business customers. Still though, compared to Windows...
You know that most companies for example won't switch from IE to Firefox for exact such reasons?