After seeing I robot, I simply can't trust him to do science fiction.

You forgot District 9, which I would recommend. Good plot: actually gives the viewer some things to think about, as opposed to "aliens bad, people good" type stuff. Good visuals: special effects and CGI believable, also the camera switching technique was interesting.

That's all very nice, and I follow most of those guidelines, and try to do the others.

But the reality is that even if, say, ALL of Europe was magically CO2 free -- that is none whatsoever, not a gram released from transport, food production, heating, electricity production, etc -- at the snap of the fingers, it would only be a little more than half of what China produces each year (currently 4.3 vs 7.7 million tonnes).

This is something much much bigger than one person, or even one average-sized country. Really the only way anything will get done is by world leaders agreeing to do something about it: setting up treaties, regulatory bodies, carbon markets, reforestation programs and the like. And properly funding all of this.

Fat fucking chance of that happening I'm afraid.

With the US actively stopping any such talk for a decade or more to "protect the economy" (and then most decidely NOT protecting the world economy, but that's a different story), things were already moving extremely slowly, "we've decided to not decide on anything just yet" meeting after meeting. And now China is another major obstacle.

Future generations will hate us for what we are doing, leading our world on a path of famine, drought and war, while at the same time having the knowledge and ability to prevent it.

Well some things don't change much throughout history.

The tactics employed by Genghis Khan are still applicable on a modern battlefield. The way Julius Cesar used the rivalries of the various tribes to conquer Gaul is very similar to what the British (and later the Americans) did in North America, 1700 years later.

Speaking of the ancient Romans, many of their political critiques could easily have been written in our time.

But technology is another matter. While Khan and Cesar would be able to understand and recognize the tactics and strategies of later wars of conquest, the same could not be said of the weapons used. There is very little in common with a horse archer and a Abraham tank in that regard (though they are used in roughly the same manner).

So now the question is, do interfaces have more in common with weapons technology or battle strategy?

That's exactly what KDE 4 does, you can choose the workspace based on the type of device you are using. Some applications will also change their layout based on the workspace.

Eh, I like Debian better myself, but the pointy-haired types like the feeling of security that comes with the support package. Also, some server hardware requires it.

It does the job well though, in my experience it has been solid and stable.

Asimov's vision of the world economy being controlled by machines has become reality.

Unfortunately for us, the machines we actually put in place bear little resemblance to those he described. Instead of being programmed with the 3 laws, and therefore a help to mankind by eliminating poverty and famine, we have programmed them to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Such a system can not, and will not, be sustainable - as History so abundantly proves.

RedHat's main product, RHEL, is not a good choice for a consumer product. Great for servers though, where it can already be bought pre-loaded from a variety of different manufacturers.

Fedora could be a candidate, but is generally too flaky for mass deployment, and there are no support contracts available for it. RedHat would have to be convinced to get back into the consumer Linux market, something which they have explicitly avoided for a number of years now.

Dell has already sold several different consumer grade systems pre-loaded with Ubuntu, but never with much publicity (/. notwithstanding) and therefore not in significant numbers. These efforts have also not lasted too long. This time may be different, but first let's see if they actually release it, at this point it's still vaporware.

Valve is a big deal for Linux, but they haven't said they would stop supporting Windows, so to MS it's not an immediate danger. Sure, some people may no longer need to boot into Windows as often, and a few may remove it entirely from their systems, but I highly doubt it will lead to a big decrease in Windows licenses sold.

As you said, Blizzard has not publicized any plans for a possible strategy shift as Valve has.

Mozilla is an obvious anti-MS, Firefox was started in part to restore open standards on the web, IOW, to loosen IE's iron grip on the web.

Don't get me wrong, as a longtime Linux-only user, nothing would please me more than my favorite OS getting some much needed attention from important software and hardware companies, especially at the expense of MS and/or Apple. I just don't think it will happen any time soon. Look at LibreOffice, it's free and roughly equivalent to MS Office for the average non-professional user, but it has yet to gain any kind of significant traction. And as long as MS has a hold on Office, Windows will be around.

Option C) Keep selling windows, but partner with a Linux distributor as a back up plan. Canonical would be a good candidate for such a partnership.

As other have said, there isn't one that's "better" than the other in a general sense. However, there are situations in which one is better suited to a task at hand.

This is of course something that applies to many different aspects of application design and architecture.

As an example, I'm developing a high volume, high transaction website application and use both PostgreSQL and MongoDB.

We use SQL where strict relations, type checking, and data integrity are required. The SQL database has the extremely important function of making sure the data given to it by the application is coherent. I realize that MongoDB has functions for checking data integrity, but it is tricker to get right in my opinion and experience (it does allow greater flexibility however). Also, the application has the need for atomic operations and transactions, which MongoDB does not provide.

MongoDB on the other hand, is used where it delivers better performance than PostgreSQL. For example all our logging is sent there, giving near-disk performance while allowing quick and easy searching and archival. Our session is also handled by MongoDB. Finally we make great use of gridFS for all our uploaded content and document storage. We're also looking into MongoDB for data analysis and reporting, fed data from SQL.

So there's no reason to pick one over the other, a mix and match approach will yield better results. Where tasks require greater speed and have loose integrity requirements, go for NoSQL. When the data absolutely needs to be coherent and is by its nature relational, go for SQL.

Also, PostgreSQL will soon support embedding JSON objects directly, so some sort of hybridization is foreseeable in the future. As of now we simply put the Mongo ID in SQL when we need to reference.

Don't know about Germany, but I've driven from Marseille (south of France) to Paris in about 8.5 hours - at night, but not speeding (much) and with food/bathroom breaks.

The TGV, which I've also taken, does it in 3.5 hours, and I can eat and go to the bathroom without stopping.

Cost depends, if you have 4 people in the car and split the fuel and toll costs, it's generally cheaper than 4 train tickets. But for 2 or 3 people, it depends on whether you buy the train tickets in advance or not. For one person, the train will be cheaper, sometimes considerably so.

You're quite right of course, but the same could be said for some European companies.

For example, SNCF sued a food stall lady over her use of the term "Orient Express".

SNCF is wholly-owned by the French governement.