There's no reason that any of those things require low level hooks. Every single one of those functions is managed by a command-line program that can be called from anywhere (GUI control panel, CLI, shell script, etc.). All GNOME has to do is call the same command line utilities that shell scripts do.

Indeed it does, and this very discussion is about one of those daemons. The Linux-only crowd is saying that GNOME should require systemd as a dependency. Unfortunately, systemd only runs on Linux. I think that GNOME should not depend on systemd until it has been ported to other operating systems (e.g. BSD, Solaris). Once systemd is available on all the platforms that GNOME supports, GNOME can rely on it being available.

On windows the gnome support helps port over many familiar Linux based apps to a windows world which is great for Linux people who are forced to work in a windows world, but the apps have little to zero adoption from 'Windows users' themselves.

I disagree with this. Two GTK apps, at least (GIMP and Pidgin), have very strong adoption in the Windows world. Pidgin is a damn good multi-platform/multi-protocol chat client, and lots of Windows users use despite having never been exposed to Linux. GIMP doesn't have as much adoption (thanks to Photoshop), but its used by Windows users who can't afford Photoshop, and don't want to go through the risks of pirating it.

I don't use GNU/Linux because its free. I use it because its the best tool for my job. If Windows supported the tools I need for my development activities, I'd use Windows. As it is, web development is far simpler in a Unix/Linux environment than a Windows environment (and the production server is running Linux), so I use Linux for development.

Can Google Voice do video? For me the main attraction to Skype is that its video-calling seems to be more stable than any of the alternatives.

USPS is more expensive than UPS or FedEx for shipping stuff which must be shipped, you know, "stuff". (Defined as having mass and taking up space.)

Really? That hasn't been my experience. For shipping in the contiguous US USPS media mail has hard to beat rates.

That's the impression I got too. There was a glitch in the update; the satellite went into safe mode; NASA analyzed and fixed the issue, and now all's well again. Certainly, not the ideal scenario, but things could have gone much more badly.

It only looks like its moving slowly and gradually because you're looking at it from a helicopter. If you compare the water's speed with the size of the objects being carried (e.g. houses and boats), you'll see that the wave is actually moving quite quickly. In the video (if you look carefully), you can see a car speeding down the road in an attempt to get away. The wave is moving almost as fast as the car.

The people on the bridge were likely there because it was the highest/sturdiest structure in the area, not necessarily because they wanted to gawk at the tsunami.

The summary gets its info from one of TFAs, which states:

On the other hand, if you made that statement in a public forum, and I didn't steal anything, I could sue for slander. You would be making false statements with the intent of damaging my reputation. Its arguable that Microsoft did the same thing here, by branding this person as a cheater in its XBox Live service.

Not to be overly nihilistic here, but every time such a revolution has occurred, the common man has ended up right back at the bottom of the socio-economic power structure. The last famous person who said something like that was Marx, and we all know how those revolutions ended up.

I lean more towards the quote attributed to Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." Similarly, capitalism is the worst economic system... except for all the others.

Not necessarily. I'm no "Greed is Good," follower of Rand, but a lot of ideas and inventions get marketed because of greed. Greed is an influence on a person's personality, just like everything else. Too much of it distorts, but the right amount of greed makes for a driven individual that can accomplish great things.

If you're using OSS software on Windows, SourceForge is the place to go. This fact lends support to my hypothesis that the attack was cover for injecting malware into open-source projects. Windows is malware's biggest target, and users are beginning to gravitate towards using open source tools over piracy (mainly due to fears of malware, ironically enough). With that in mind, I guess Sourceforge was a pretty big target for crackers.

Well, if you wanted to sneak malicious code into an open-source project, cracking its repository might be a good way to do so.

It depends. Do you consider the person innocent until proven guilty or guilty until proven innocent? As far as I'm concerned, the burden of proof is on Microsoft to show that this person cheated.